Something About the Smallness

There's something about the smallness of humanity in the face of creation that fills my soul with deep satisfaction and contentment.

Nothing rejuvenates my spirit like being a speck beneath a vast starry expanse, standing on the edge of a continent with an endless ocean roaring in my face, looking into the high, craggy countenance of a massive mountain range, or the feeling the raw power of a thunderstorm raging through the sky, lightning dancing to the rolls and strikes of thunder.

There's something about the smallness in the face of creation that slays that deadly sin, pride, and casts off the illusion that I have any semblance of control in this world.

Dropping the weight of that baggage allows me to truly feel free. God's got it.

This video contains what is quite possibly my favorite piece of writing ever, Carl Sagan's, "The Pale Blue Dot". If you too like that sense of smallness, Sagan conveys it well.

"The Pale Blue Dot" was inspired by this photograph -- taken by Voyager as it was leaving our solar system -- which shows our beautiful planet suspended in a sunbeam.

Of Swords and Sonnets

My favorite time of the school year as a freshmen English teacher is April. The STAAR test is behind us, and it's time to bust out swords and sonnets! Shakespeare, baby!

Last year, for the first time, I went in depth teaching iambic pentameter to students and told them to attempt writing a sonnet in iambic pentameter for homework. The purpose is so they can be blown away by Shakespeare's mad skills -- a ridiculous portion of his 37 plays and 150+ sonnets are written in that meter. And it works. They recognize the man's genius by the time they've banged their heads against their desks trying to get the syllable count, stress, and rhyme scheme just so.

Before I assigned it, however, I knew I had to tackle it myself. The syllable stress still isn't perfect, but I love this freaking sonnet, so I'm sharing it. 

It's called "A Sonnet for my Pockets".

Hem hem. 

For ladies pockets are a total sham

In them there is no room to fit my things 

Unfair it is that sirs have more than ma’ams

Upon this day sadness my pocket brings

Mine husband says I rant too much for these

My lady pockets though won’t hold gum sticks

They are not even large enough for keys 

We must lug large purses to carry tricks 

Used daily like phones, wallets, coins and mints 

Lame lady pockets cause blinding fury 

These grievances drive me to yelling hence 

 Clothing designers please listen, hurry! 

     Correct thine foul error or else I’ll crack
     I prithee take these lady pockets back!

Come on, patriarchy. Just let me have some freaking pockets.

    

Tales from the Crypt (the newsroom)

I kept up a regular blog back in 2010-2011 when I was working in journalism that has some fun writing that I'm actually quite proud of. The first post, "The Interview" is quintessential Barber. For those who know me now, but didn't know me then, click below to read some Tales from the Crypt... AKA the newsroom. Same old Barber, (those pictures though!) completely different life (thank God).

https://dontbreakthenews.wordpress.com/2010/12/

Dive In... To A Great Book!

Reading is like swimming in the ocean.

When you’re learning how to do it, it’s difficult and not very fun. Currents are trying to grab you and drag you under. Waves are knocking you around like a rubber ducky in a bathtub with a wild 3-year-old. Seaweed brushes up against your leg and you have a mini-heart attack, wondering if you’re about to be attacked by a shark or feel the sting of jellyfish tentacles. You can’t see the world below the water. You aren’t having any fun. It’s hard. For those reasons, you don’t seem to get much out of it. At its worst, surface level reading is drowning. At its best, it’s boring.

But to a strong reader, reading is like SCUBA diving the Great Barrier Reef. You have the proper equipment to breathe easily, see clearly, and glide through the water, powerful and weightless. Now a bright, magical, foreign world full of colorful marine life has opened itself up to you. There are too many new wonders to explore to even attempt to count. The beauty at this depth will knock your socks off.

You’re unhindered now; instead of being this alien outsider fighting the currents and thrashing against the waves, you are fully absorbed into the world of the ocean – you’re part of the story now.

But you have to get through the slogging open water swim – gasping for air, lactic acid turning your muscles to wasted rubber, salt water burning your eyes -- before you can experience the wonders of the deep. Tough it out. Challenge yourself. Each time you read something outside your comfort zone, you’re getting closer to being able to put on your SCUBA equipment.

And when that finally happens, you’re not struggling through words and counting how many pages are left until the end of the chapter. Not you; not anymore! You’re floating as effortlessly around Hogwarts as Nearly Headless Nick. You’re part of the story. You’re inside the castle, in a world you built with your imagination (and a little bit of help from an author).

No longer struggling through the currents and waves and being fully equipped with the proper SCUBA gear frees you up to open your eyes, look around you, and appreciate the depth of literature.

Knockturn Alley = nocturnally? Nice pun, Rowling. Severus Snape’s name comes from the Latin root meaning severe – which he most definitely is. Albus means white; there’s a little symbolism for you. Remus Lupin is named after a Roman myth about one of the founders of that ancient empire, who was raised by wolves… and his last name, Lupin, is Latin for moon.

When you’re diving in the reef, when you’re part of the story, you’ll notice qualities such as these. Ingenious foreshadowing, carefully and lovingly strung out across seven novels, allegorical connections to World War II. Wisdom dripping with eloquent beauty from the mouth of the eccentric, lovable sage, Albus Dumbledore.  

Treasures such as these make you not only appreciate literature, but find actual enjoyment from it. You can slog through a so-called “lame” story about some kid who finds out he has magical powers and goes off to wizarding school at the surface level, or you can become a part of Hogwarts yourself and collect a trove of literary treasures along the way.

This experience is of course not limited in any way to the Harry Potter series. It’s there in more shapes, forms, and stories than are imaginable. The world’s greatest thinkers and artists have set down their stories and ideas for us to glimpse here, in their future. It’s the ability to read minds – we have access to the thoughts of men and women long dead. Take advantage of it!

It’s beautiful down here in the deep. Join me. Put on your SCUBA masks and dive into the majestic reef that is a good book. Explore. See the depth and beauty your eyes can behold when you read like this. 

A Public Service Announcement for Literary Snobs

Public Service Announcement: Fantasy and science fiction novels have as much, if not more literary merit than most genres of literature. So back up off my genre, book snobs!

Here are ten reasons fantasy and sci-fi should have more street cred in the literary community:

1. Great literature touches on the human condition. Fantasy and science fiction do this perhaps better than any other genre. While story lines may be out of this world (literally), the big, overarching questions about what it means to be human, how we should function as a society, relate to the “other”, adapt to technological advancements, coexist with the environment, explore responsibly, and even “the meaning to life the universe and everything” are brought to the forefront of the work as a whole. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, don’t panic. Just make sure you have a towel handy.


2. Because non-existent races and species exist in fantasy and science fiction, it’s easier to comment on social issues without raising people’s hackles. Bigots and racists hate on centaurs, muggle-borns and house elves, instead of homosexuals, African-Americans, and the impoverished; the ostracization and inequality can perhaps be seen in a different light by the perpetrators here in the real world… at least until they find out Dumbledore is gay.

3. Fantasy and science-fiction novels are epic, meaning everything is expanded to epic proportions. Epic settings, epic themes, epic character development, epic conflicts, etc. etc. There’s so much to see on the way “there and back again”! As a Texan who knows bigger is better, I appreciate this.

4. Character development is extreme, due to the extreme environments and situations characters face. Who among those who have read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series didn’t go from hating Jaime Lannister to loving him? Martin first paints the Kingslayer as a poisonous, despicable man of no honor; a man who commits incest, fathers the devil (basically), and attempts to murder children. And as the story progresses, Jaime, too, progresses – into a man of integrity of all things!

5. Symbolism, motifs, allegory, irony, transportational imagery and figurative language, among a plethora of other literary devices, are all just as prevalent in most fantasy and science fiction novels as they are in classics like The Great Gatsby. Find allegory to World War II in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, motifs strewn across Westeros in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, irony in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series, symbols in The Lord of the Rings, and rich examples of imagery and figurative language in all of the above, as well as many, many other wonderful works.

6. Nuggets of life wisdom are everywhere. Because so many of our books are epic and feature archetypes, we almost always have at least one sage present. With wise old wizards and Jedi masters popping up left and right, one can’t help but take away some of the best advice dropped in literature.

• “Try not! Do! Or do not! There is no try.” – Yoda
• “Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I’ve found. I found it is the small things. Every day deeds by ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay.” –Gandalf
• “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” – Dumbledore
• “Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.” – Tyrion Lannister
• “The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.” – Ender Wiggin

7. You’ll find author’s purpose in writing with a specific style to convey meaning. I’m just going to leave this little bit of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 here for you. Here’s Montag describing what the media experience is like in his time without books:

“A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge, and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never – quite – touched – bottom – never – never – quite – no not quite – touched – bottom… and you fell so fast you didn’t touch the sides either… never… quite… touched… anything. The thunder faded. The music died.”

8. Fantasy and science fiction authors make the world a better place through their writing – fantasy authors do this by often reflecting on our relationship with the earth, such as J.R.R. Tolkien does in The Two Towers, where we see forests being destroyed for fuel. Tolkien adeptly handles the conflict between industrialization and environmentalism. Science fiction authors envision technologies previously undreamt of, which then inspire innovators to find a way to create them. Again, to reference Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the “seashells” everyone uses are essentially wireless ear buds. Fahrenheit 451 was written in 1953. Revisit points 1 and 2 for more on the genre’s mad skills at dealing with social commentary.

9. Even though often terrible conflicts are raging, fantasy and science fiction authors are excellent at deftly weaving levity into the story. This genre without a doubt provides more laugh out loud moments than any other. Fred and George Weasley defy your disagreement.

10. There is no better outlet for armchair adventurers. Let’s all be honest with one another. One of the main reasons we read is for escape from the pressures of our own daily lives. Whether we’re in a galaxy far, far away, at Hogwarts or in the Shire, fighting the Buggers with Ender, protecting the Wall from white walkers, or just having your towel at the ready in case our planet is bull-dozed in an untimely manner, you can’t ask for a better adventure than what you find when you open the cover of a fantasy or science fiction novel.


Lastly, I leave you with a poem:

Some will always knock our genre
We will just recite our mantra
The force, the hallows, the one ring
Those epic stories make us sing
As always haters gonna hate
But we’ve got fans who get irate
So watch out or you’ll get beat down
By fright’ning mobs in costumed gown
See, we nerd out like no one else
So please respect our genre’s shelf!

Idealist

Bright and white-hot

Burns the flame within my breast

The fiery dance of passion

Beating fiercely – it’s my heart

Dark and black-cold

Freezes the ice over the world

The cutting winds of apathy

Slice cruelly – through my heart

But the knife melts in the fire

And the wind fans the flames

The fiery dance of passion
Beating fiercely – cracks the ice

My Mantra

You know what I want to do?

I want to save up some money, or maybe even just take out a loan; and take off.

I want to travel everywhere, even the seemingly ugly, unimportant parts of the world. No -- especially to those places.

I want to discover other people's realities, and make them my own for a while.

I want my worldview, to actually be a worldview, not a Lindsay view.

I want to speak as many different languages as possible.

I want to hang out with some Buddhist monks, and find my missing spirituality.

I want to ride on a train across Europe, and do nothing but stare out the window lost in thought.

I want to stand on the top of an active volcano in Hawaii and watch rock boil.

I want to look a huge bear right in the eyes in the Canadian wilderness.

I want to go to the Arctic Circle and feel burning cold, and stand in awe of the Northern Lights.

I want to row a little boat through the Congo in the depths of Africa, covered head to toe in mosquito netting and bug spray, and then still manage to come down with malaria.

I want to climb Mt. Everest and push myself to limits I didn't know I had.

I want to lie on a nude beach in Croatia and get sunburned in places that have never known the sunshine.

I want to be in the middle of a war zone with bombshells flying.

I want to go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, despite my irrational fear of fish.

I want to ride a camel across the Gobi Desert and develop an unquenchable thirst.

I want to stand on top of an Aztec temple and yell and yell until the savage in my soul is satisfied.

I want to jump out of an airplane thousands of feet above the ground.

I want to be unabashedly aware of my mortality every second of the rest of my life.

I want to be out in the middle of nowhere stargazing and realize just how incredibly small and insignificant my life actually is.

I want to lose my sense of self-importance.

I want to be the most alive person I know.

And when I die, whether it's in ten years or fifty, I want people to look at my dead body and think, "There's someone who really, actually, completely lived."
Then I will fall into dust and become nothing.