Global economics has never felt so relevant!

Published

One of the definite perks of traveling back and forth between the States and Lithuania so much is the fact that I sometimes get to have layovers in beautiful places. I've got an overnight in London coming up next week on my way home, and last November I got a morning in Copenhagen. I managed to take some pictures there, which I posted publicly on Flickr.

I recently got an email telling me that my photo of Christiansborg square had been selected for inclusion in a new, online guidebook called Schmap. These are cool, free downloadable city guides for various major tourist destinations. Check it out! Best of all is that (unlike LCC's promotional department which has kyped pictures of mine off Flickr and included them in official materials without giving credit. Ahem), they contacted me and asked for permissions and had me sign an official copyright release to the images. Way to be ethical, Schmap-people. Incidentally, I don't even think it's that interesting of a picture! But it's fun to be included.

Tidbits

1. First, brilliant stuff (that I, of course really happen to agree with!) from Annie. (This one from a few weeks ago was good too).

2. Anyone hankering for some good winter fun in Lietuva? SAS published its winter specials

3. I can't remember what I was going to put here. It was interesting though, I promise. I'll add when I remember... ah yes, here it is:

"In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.” (from NYT).

So there, I'm not weird for feeling like death or sleep are the only logical approaches to this much darkness!

"people living in the land of the shadow..."

There is a weight to grayness in Klaipeda, in November, that is smothering. Add to the greyness the fact that the day begins around 9 and starts to dim again at 4. It hardly matters, though, because the only difference between night and day is that instead of dark gray, things are pale gray. We still have 3 weeks to go before solstice, when the loss of daylight will stop, but with losing 4 minutes a day, that's over an hour of light still to be lost. Someone once told me about a glowing orb in the sky which makes things bright. I forget what it's called. Remind me?

In addition to feeling smothered by weather (or more accurately, like the cloud cover is sitting on my chest, making it impossible to breath, then stuffing my head with cotton and immobilizing my limbs), I'm also buried underneath 120 Academic Writing projects that need to be handed back by Wednesday, so that I'm able to intake 60 more next weekend, and the week after that. This explains both why I haven't blogged in awhile, and why I'm procrastinatorily posting now! I think the dread of beginning to mark such a stack always outweighs the actual process.

My consolation is that soon, soon, soon I will be back in the land of sunshine and mountains. Reading back over those paragraphs I see I'm a typical candidate for seasonal affective disorder, and that I'm more than typically affected by landscape and weather. If you live in a place where you have seen sunshine this week (or even last), get down on your knees and thank God for it.

Another consolation to this darkness is that I feel it must put me in an Advent frame of mind more thoroughly than if I were living somewhere bright. This time in the church calendar is all about waiting, enduring the darkness of God's absence in those moments before He made good on all those promises to ancient Israel. This is the time of the remnant of Israel keeping watch in the centuries of darkness that preceded The Light of the World's arrival in human form. Imagine holding onto the hope that God would again shine His face on His people, even hundreds of years after they had been lost into exile.

And then... finally....

One favorite piece of music this time of year is the German poem, "Break Forth O Beauteous Heavenly Light," which Bach wrote music for in 1734:

Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light,
And usher in the morning;
O shepherds, shrink not with fright,
But hear the angel’s warning.
This Child, now weak in infancy,
Our confidence and joy shall be,
The power of Satan breaking,
Our peace eternal making.

The words and the music together, the promise in them, and the soaring melody, constantly heal me. This is the gospel - not fear, but light breaking through darkness, our JOY and CONFIDENCE that Christ has broken Satan's power and made way for peace. Eight lines, a few measures, but this is everything.

Recommendations

My friend Annie has done a great job lately on filling us in on her reading and film viewing habits. I've recently been kept company by a few works that I thought I should share:

You know how some music makes you feel like you're driving in a car with the windows open, through the mountains, as the sun is going down, and you're caked with dirt, sweat and bug bites from camping, and the car is full of your friends, and you're really, really happy, convinced that, no matter what happens in your life, things are going to turn out alright? (Or is that just me?)

I heard Josh Ritter's song "Good Man" played over the end of the finale of "House M.D.," season three. It conveyed the kind of lightness and wholeness that sent me running to my computer to figure out what song it was, and the inevitable subsequent iTunes purchase. Worth every penny - especially the song "Snow is Gone," from his album Hello Starling, with the memorable line: "I'd rather be the one who loves/ than to be loved and never even know." How've I gone this long without hearing this guy?! He's a Westerner (from Idaho) and his songs are full of wildlife and landscapes and all the stuff that makes me achingly homesick for summer and roads that I know.


There's a term for people who are highly knowledgeable in many areas - they're called polymaths. I make no pretensions to being one; I do, however, find myself endlessly fascinated by a new podcast, In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, that I signed up for a couple months ago. One week, it's the history of The Arabian Nights and its acceptance into European literary circles, the next week,"The Discovery of Oxygen," then insights on the Fibonacci sequence, followed by explication of Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, "The Prelude". Not to mention investigations into the notion of guilt, what constitutes taste, Arab medieval philosophy.... It is a yummy program. The host interviews professors who are experts on the various topics and it's phenomenally engaging, even if you never thought "the discovery of oxygen" could make for a good 45 minute interview. I find myself wishing more of my university classes had been like these.


Ever since the days of reading Little House on the Prairie under my covers as a 7 year old (thus ruining my eyesight forever), I have been a notorious sucker for stories of pioneer wives. A friend sent me a DVD of an independent film, Sweet Land, that was released to a handful of theaters last year. I confess that before watching it I was skeptical of it being of the Janette Oke, western-wife-finds-God- and-love-on-the-prairie sort, full of heavy-handed Hallmark Hall of Fame greeting card sentimentality. I was very sweetly pleased to find otherwise (that is, after I got through wiping up the puddles of tears I cried seeing the big family scene at the film's opening. Yikes, I'm homesick! Don't worry, the film's only a tear-jerker for the currently exiled expats to whom America looms mythically large and beautiful from a distance).

Without giving away the (simple) plot too much, it's basically about a mail-order bride who comes to Minnesota from Norway in 1920. There are the expected challenges and prejudices, but what makes the movie surprising is the subtleness, silence and open spaces in the film. I LOVED the fact that there are large portions of Norwegian and German dialog left completely untranslated by subtitles - from two Norwegian young women chatting together at the train station, to the outbursts the frustrated young women shouts at her groom-to-be. They communicate with each other in smatterings of broken English, Norwegian, and German cognates, but other than that, there is a lot of silence, confusion and muddling through. I like this linguistic element for two reasons, 1. it reminds me that America has had, and always will have, the kind of linguistic diversity that I live with every day in Lithuania (even if no longer in the places I happen to live in the States), and 2. I can SO relate to the young woman's disorientation as so much of what goes on around her is unintelligible, even as she tries to figure out where she fits in this society.

Finally, it made me think about the lovely young women who I've met over the years at LCC, Ana from Albania, Agata from Lativa, and my friend Oksana a Russian-Lithuanian (among others) who have married American men, and whose own national stories are now going to be knit into those of my home country, just as mine has (just a little bit) been knit into this one. I love how strong these women are, to do the hard task of making homes in the world, to leave everything known behind and plant your feet firmly where you've arrived. The immigration debates going on in the States today are not new ones, but this film and my friends who're currently living out this story remind me of the rich history of America, and how its story is, fundamentally, the collective story of millions of individuals who have lived out this one.