A Place of Love and Beauty

"And ye are to be taught from on high. Sanctify yourselves and ye shall be endowed with power, that ye may give even as I have spoken." -- Doctrine and Covenants 43:16 

"For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light is Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ." -- Doctrine and Covenants 84:45

Last Friday I had the incredible honor and opportunity to attend the temple with my dear friend Madison. Madi has decided to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has been called to serve in the Romania Bucharest Mission.

I am thrilled for her. Missions are life-changing, sacred experiences. I truly believe that they are a way that God shows His love for all of us--both for the ones serving and for those missionaries are called to serve and love.

I also believe that the temple endowment is a gift of God's love and knowledge to His children. It is something that He wants all of His children to receive. There is power which comes from making and keeping promises with God.

It was a sacred privilege to help prepare Madison for her first experience at the temple (although most of that preparation came on her own through her life and her thirst for light and truth). I am simply grateful that I was able to share this special day with her.

Truly, the temple is a place of love and beauty.

"And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things." -- Doctrine and Covenants 88:67 

Some thoughts on authenticity

I've been going through my iPhone photos recently, deleting pictures and making room for future shameless selfies.

Like these ones:

See what I mean? Shameless. I am incredibly vain.

But the thing is . . . although these pictures capture some form of my personality (mostly my vanity), they really are not what I look like. I mean, of course they are pictures of myself. But they are the best pictures I took after a few tries. And then they were edited, filtered, etc., to get just the right look I was going for.

Selfies are a twenty-first century art form.

(Oh man . . . what that says about our society is very revealing and quite sad.)

At the same time, I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with wanting to make yourself look good. That's part of what social media is about, isn't it? We're branding ourselves. And we want that brand to be attractive.

We all have a desire to be remembered well. And I think most of us want others to think that we are attractive, clever, and put-together.

Most of humanity has had that desire before social media ever came along.

Take Anne Frank, for example. I think that a very revealing parts of her humanity comes through when she is quite honest about how she looks and how she wishes she looked. She has a picture in her diary and then a write-up to the side:

"This is a photo as I would wish myself to look all the time. Then I might have a chance to go to Hollywood. But I'm sorry to say that I usually look different these days." 

[via annefrank.org]

I think all of us have pictures of ourselves that we wish we looked like all of the time. We all have favorite pictures of ourselves or favorite time of life that we wish we could relive.

Below are some pictures of myself as I wish I could look all the time:

I took these selfies on a day I was feeling particularly pretty, confident, and happy, as the next picture shows:

[Sorry about the terrible lighting--my room is actually not a photography studio. Weird, I know.

But you can tell that I am happy from my eyes. You can always tell in the eyes.]

Here's a more picture where I look more natural and less make-uped . . . it's a more "real" picture of me (whatever that means), but I am still happy. Tired, but happy.

[Fun fact about Megan #43: I take selfies in the car when I am waiting/when I am bored. I also take selfies when I have new clothes. This is a new shirt and I felt happy wearing it. The end.]

These are the pictures--the ones where I am truly happy--are the moments and memories that I wish could last all the time. And photographs provide a way for those memories, those regrets, and those wishes to resurface.

At the same time, life is not picture-perfect. We have blemishes, we blink when the flash goes off, someone photobombs us, or we look and feel bloated on school picture day.

There are pictures of ourselves that we don't want anyone to see. Ones that we instantly "untag" ourselves from on Facebook. Selfies that never see the light of Instagram or SnapChat.

There are parts of ourselves that we don't want others to know about.

Honestly, there is a lot about ourselves that our 15 million friends on social media don't need to know about.

And I don't think that makes you any less genuine if you don't want to post about your latest break-up or your faith crisis or your sister's battle with cancer or anything that is too private and personal to share over the cold and unfeeling interwebs.

So the question is, how do we put our best foot forward while at the same time being authentic and "real"? We complain that the lives and pictures and posts people post on social media aren't "real." And you know what? They're not. At least, not entirely. They are what people want others to see. And part of that is real. But it's not every single waking hour of their lives. Honestly, that would be overwhelming and disturbing to know what went on inside of our friend's heads all of the time.

We need filters for what we say. (And for the pictures we post on Instagram, naturally).

But more than that, we need compassion. We need to be more willing to give others the benefit of the doubt with their posts, but also know that others will probably not give that same compassion to us.

I recently saw a quote by Thomas Merton that said, "Pride makes us artificial. Humility makes us real. And real is what makes us beautiful."

I think there's a lot of truth in that.

I need to think about it more.

. . . anyway, a lot of that was rambling. Basically, I'm still thinking about these things and this was a way to address the void and get my thoughts out.

But, if you have any opinions on this subject, let me know. I think this is an important issue and I would love to hear your thoughts.

Summer Reading

Summer is coming to an end/is over, depending on how you decide when fall begins (for some, it's the moment the bell rings on the first day of school, for others, the day after Labor Day, for the sun it's the Equinox . . .).

In any event, I've been doing a lot of reading this summer. I have almost permanently had a book at my side as an extra appendage. In fact, it got to a point that my family members knew my summer better than I did--or at least were willing to answer the "what did you do this summer" question for me. One time a kind person asked that oh-so-harmless small talk question.

Kind Person (to me): What have you been doing this summer?

Me: Uhhhhhhhh.

My sister Sarah: She's been doing a lot of reading.

Kind Person: Oh.

And the conversation usually ends there. I think they're expecting me to say some extraordinary thing like, "Oh, I hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro," or "Oh, I rafted down the Amazon." (Honestly, people, I'm quite boring. Sorry to disappoint.)

But the thing is, I've been quite happy with my reading list this summer and crossing off some works I've been meaning to read and then re-reading some of my favorites.

And since I have this insatiable need to share people what I learned, here are some of my favorite quotes from my summer reading. (I could do a blog post about each book I read this summer, but I read about fifty, and that might get tiresome . . . also, a lot of the books I read were historiographies for Oxford preparations, and I read a couple of books on economics to prove a point, but I digress.)

[My Book o' Quotes.] 

"There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." --My Antonia, by Willa Cather 

"Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." --My Antonia

"Sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom." --My Antonia

"Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me." --My Antonia 

"Dostoevsky said once, 'There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.' These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom [the freedom to choose one's attitude] cannot be lost. It can be said they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom--which cannot be taken away--that makes life meaningful and purposeful." --Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl

"We had to learn ourselves [. . .] that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. [. . .] Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." --Man's Search for Meaning

"Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations." --Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted and be willing to face the consequences whatever they are. And if he is filled with fear he cannot do it. My great prayer is always for God to save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fears of the consequences for his personal life he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems which we confront in every age and every generation." --Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"Katie heard the story. 'It's come at last,' she thought, 'the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them--I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them.'" --A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

"So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?" --All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

"She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." --Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

"What does the brain matter compared to the heart?" --Mrs. Dalloway 

"Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, how vivid, and cruel. One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own [. . .] was there anything so real as words?" --A Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

"Cynicism is nothing more than idealism gone sour." --That Ye May Believe, Neal A. Maxwell

"Even in the midst of deep and discouraging blackness we are to trust in the Lord in order to show that we are a 'friend of God' by being 'righteous in the dark.'" --That Ye May Believe 

"It takes intelligence and faith in order to make one's way through [the ambiguities of life]." --That Ye May Believe 

"Power comes from love. Achievement and ability come from love. We can try to do it on our own, or we can really achieve with the Savior--by accepting His love and being willing to love others in return." --Disciples, Cheiko Okazaki

"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." --A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially." --A Farewell to Arms 

"But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories." --The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." --The Things They Carried 

"The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writing knowing guilt and sorrow. And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life." --The Things They Carried 

"Nabokov says that every great novel is a fairy tale. [. . .] But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need to give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by Fate." --Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

"Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors, and infidelities of life." --Reading Lolita in Tehran 

"Learn to fight for your happiness." --Reading Lolita in Tehran 

"To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared? [. . .] We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts, and feelings." --Reading Lolita in Tehran 

-If you were wondering, my top three books this summer were My Antonia, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reading Lolita in Tehran. I also loved anything I read by Neal A. Maxwell.-

Oxford (aka HOGWARTS) packing list

Part of going to Oxford means that you get a packing list eerily similar to one belonging to a 4th year Hogwarts student.

For example, did you know that I have to buy robes? Like, I have to wear black robes to events like matriculation and exams. 

Guys. 

I HAVE TO WEAR ROBES TO SCHOOL. I AM BASICALLY GOING TO HOGWARTS. 

And yes, I have now turned into that annoying American girl who will compare everything to Harry Potter. Sick of me yet? Too late? Oh well. Might as well embrace it. 

Besides school robes, I have to get fancy dresses for special events. Formal halls, balls, things like that. 

I've been on the hunt for the perfect dress. Because it's not every day a girl gets to go to an Oxford formal hall. 

And I found the dress the other day. 

It's perfect. It's golden-brown, classy, unique, feels like silk, but it is machine washable, baby.  

[Update: Here is the dress, since I neglected to post a picture of it last night. I may or may not be wearing it to church today. Because it's a new dress. And it's a new dress that makes me feel pretty. So even though there is no special occasion, I'm wearing the dress. Ha.] 

I feel like a Roman empress in it. 

Or like Hermione Granger going to the Yule Ball. Except my dress is gold instead of lilac. 

So, like I said. 

This is year 4 at Hogwarts. 

I am Hermione Granger. 

AND I AM GOING TO THE YULE BALL. 

Could life get any cooler? 

Probably not. 

i'll meet you young and free for a dance 'round the memory tree

Hello, world.

I promise that I'm still alive.
I just haven't been in the mood to write lately.
Like, I have things coming.
I can feel them in my mind and in my heart.

Thoughts from things I've read.
Things I've seen.
Things I've heard.
Things I've felt.

But right now?

It's mostly busywork.
Paperwork.
Red tape.
Preparations.

I sometimes wonder if purgatory is just a long line in a bureaucratic office where you never move. Ever.
A long, never-ending line without phone service or Wi-Fi.
I'm pretty sure that if Dante had known about visa and immigration offices he would have written about it in his Inferno. 
Queues in bureaucratic offices in general.
A special circle of their own.
"Now serving number 83."

I had things I meant to write.
Kind of like a "little lists" kind of write-up.
Just so I would write, really.
Because often beginning is the hardest.
But I forgot all that I wanted to say.
Even though it was very clever in my mind.
But now.
To-do lists fill my head
instead of the things I'd actually like to think about.

But I am alive.

And I get do to things with people I love.
People who remind me that I am more than a brain.

Those reminders are important.
So thank you to all.
Pictured or not.
Thank you for the memories you give me.
Thank you for reminding me of what I am made of.
That I do have a brain
but that I also have a heart.
And a voice.
And a knack for silliness.
Because goodness knows I need people who will let me be silly every once in awhile.
And who encourage it.
And people who love me the way I am
but believe that I can always be better--
and maximize my potential.
Which is so much more than a brain.

*Song of the day: A Dance 'Round the Memory Tree, by Oren Lavie

But a very, very cute drowned rat.

Last Friday I decided to join the ever-lovely Amberlea at the Salt Lake Temple to worship there.

As I was driving up to Salt Lake, ominous grey clouds gathered from the west and they were moving fast. The weather report promised severe thunderstorms and hail. I was hoping to get to the temple before the worst of it started.

Nope. No such luck.

I did manage to park in the Conference Center parking garage before the downpour started . . . but as I climbed the stairs and came outside onto the granite plaza of the Conference Center, there were sheets of rain coming down and forming rivers in the streets.

And there was no sign of it letting up any time soon--goodness, it had just started.

So I decided to run for it.

The temple is about a two-minute walk away from the Conference Center. I knew I wasn't going to get to the temple dry, but I wanted to get there as quickly as I could.

As my luck would have it, I got stuck at the crosswalk and had to wait an extra minute waiting for the light to change. All while buckets of water are pouring on my head, soaking my dress, getting in my shoes, and seeping into my temple bag.

The light changed and I ran across the crosswalk and the sidewalk. (I know--I'm a sinner. Running on the sidewalk. How dare I.) It was raining so hard that there was water getting into my contacts. I couldn't see because there was so much water in my eyes and I was blinking back the rain, hoping that my contacts wouldn't fall out.

When I got to the temple, I looked a lot like this:

Actually, I looked a lot less like the cleaned-up Liesl and a lot closer to Liesl when she's dripping wet and trying to sneak past Maria:

Yup. 

So, if you have ever seen The Sound of Music, then just imagine a soaking Liesl. Because that's exactly who I looked like. My dress even looked similar, except it was navy blue instead of rose pink. 

In other words, I was a sight. I looked like a drowned rat. It's fine. The looks I was getting from the temple workers were hilarious. It was even funnier because I was walking in with Amberlea--beautiful, put-together, classy Amberlea with her perfectly coiffed hair--and then I was standing next to her in all of my diluvial glory. 

It's probably a metaphor for something. 

[Sorry for the terrible lighting. This is the best picture we got of that night. After I had dried off a bit. Even though my clothes were still quite damp.] 

It's always an adventure when we're around. And I'm glad that Amberlea is around for the thick and thin, the storm and the sunshine. 

I couldn't ask for finer people in my life. 

Climb every mountain. Ford every stream. Or sidewalk. Depending on the day. 

P.S. If you get the reference I paraphrase in the blog post title, then brownie points for you. 

P.P.S. The Sound of Music also reminds me of this hilarious corner of the Internet. Enjoy. 

"Is it Latin for 'Worst Game Ever Invented'?"

These. These are good. 

 "I brolieve in you." Hahahaha.

 Story of my life.

 Story of my life #2.

 Don't mess with a Queen of Narnia.

I may or may not have done this once or twice in my life.  

 Story of my life #3.

 Um, yes.

And my personal favorite . . . 

This is what happens when you have an out-of-the-blue Narnia phase. I'm a dork. I know. But I figured these were too good not to share. 

Also, I found these all from this tumblr: It's King Edmund, Actually. There are more on the website and they are hilarious. (But be warned, some of them swear, so if you don't like that, be careful.)