Tag: Natalie Weaver

LeBron James and Loads of Baskets by Natalie Weaver

On June 8, Cleveland watched the Cavaliers lose the NBA championship.  Outside of Cleveland, according to the commentators I heard, no one really expected our guys to pull it off.  But, here in Cleveland, we felt otherwise. Up until the final four minutes of the fourth quarter, when the Herculean LeBron took the bench, we were still thinking something magical could happen.  When he stopped, the game ended.  We lost. And, the city, once again, had to recast its disappointment, redirect its energies, and rediscover the eschatological hope that is the core of Cleveland’s athletic grit: “there’s always next year!”

Over the past few years, I have noticed t-shirts popping up around the city that say things such as, “I liked Cleveland before it was cool;” “216;” and even one that details the geometric shape and geographic coordinates of a Bernie Kosar winning touchdown pass.   Ohio love is blooming in the rust; things are green in our urban gardens, and progressive real estate is making of bombed out warehouses cool art studios, breweries, and theater houses for budding local talent. Continue reading “LeBron James and Loads of Baskets by Natalie Weaver”

Implausible, Impossible Hope by Natalie Weaver

With the single exception of a weak moment in my oldest son’s kindergarten year, during which time the grade school manipulated parents into fundraising schemes by dangling socially advantageous perks (such as a reward trip to a water park) for only those children whose parents participated at a high level in the initiatives, I have never subscribed to any magazines.  Nevertheless, I continue to believe, on some core level, that Ed McMahon is even now driving down the street toward me in the white Publisher’s Clearing House van with a check for one million dollars.  The fact that Ed is long deceased seems to have no bearing on my conviction that the great Miracle, complete with balloons and a camera crew, is blazing toward me and just around the corner.  I never play the lottery, and I actually managed to go to Las Vegas once without gambling a single dollar, yet I feel almost daily that some Jackpot Jeep Bonanza Giveaway has my name all over it.

Continue reading “Implausible, Impossible Hope by Natalie Weaver”

An Open Letter to Mom by Natalie Weaver

Dear Mom,

I want to take this opportunity to tell you I have learned so much from you over these years that I have been privileged to call you “mom.” I watch you, as you get older, as I also get older, and I continue to learn from you.  You are always telling me that a person cannot know something truly until they get there; that every decade of life is different; and that life becomes, in the end-game, a process of letting go.  I see you, and I know by watching you that this is true.

I remembered you today, from when I was just a child, getting ready to go out for the evening with Dad.  You were spraying your hair into an impressive beehive, pulling on stockings, and fragrancing your wrists with Fabergé cologne.  You were beautiful then, and you taught me that life should be beautiful, our home should be a place of refuge, and every day was worth celebrating.  You used to sing about loving your home, and you maintained it so elegantly.  It was lovely to be your child in that home.  Thank you. Continue reading “An Open Letter to Mom by Natalie Weaver”

Telling Stories by Natalie Weaver

Human beings tell stories. This may sound like a simple truth.  To folklorists, literature professors, and people who work in media and in government, I would sound like a rather simple-minded child to be arriving so late in life at this obvious fact.  We tell stories.  And, just as the phrase “telling a story” might connote, our stories are not always true to life.   Our stories are descriptors and meaning-making efforts, largely rooted in our grappling with self and group identity.

Take, for example, the story of human life as exceptional in the animal kingdom.   As a child I would try to answer for myself the question of what made human beings distinct from other animals, since I had learned somewhere along the way that we were and are exceptional.  I considered the stock answer “reason,” which seemed to me sufficient to explain how human beings did everything, from the writing of language to the building of skyscrapers. As a student of theology, I enlarged upon the rational faculty to see it as the divine in the human, operating as the co-creative element with which human beings gain structural manipulation over our environments.  We make things after our image, just as God made us after God’s.   Continue reading “Telling Stories by Natalie Weaver”

Another Brick in the (Ivory) Wall by Natalie Weaver

I have recently read a couple of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the challenge of working in academia.  One article lamented the paucity of tenure line positions and the great disappointment some ex-academics feel when they finally give up searching for that elusive job, which is actually non-existent.  Another article reported on the sham interview experience, in which a national search is conducted, but the whole thing is a ruse since an internal candidate already has the position.  Hopeful candidates put their families and lives on hold as they bide months of time while thinking, completely ignorant of the reality of situation, that they may be in line for a new position.  They get letters of reference, prepare for interviews, buy suits, arrange childcare, manage time away from whatever they would otherwise be doing to make an interview, and then endure the emotional trial of waiting.

They never had a chance.  They never even knew they never had a chance.  As one who has been in this situation, I can vouch that such pretenses of fairness and transparency are not equal opportunities for employment but dishonestly motivated, targeted opportunities for exploitation.

Academia, friends, worries me enormously.  And, I’m not at all sure what we are doing.  As a former board member of a large theology society, I had the privilege of working with new members, many of whom were degree-seekers, finishing up courses, exams, and research projects.  Each person’s work could arguably be, to a greater or lesser degree, sufficiently interesting to some population of readers, but the lot, en masse, would inevitably strike me as, well, struggling in the very least to be relevant.  What schools could or would support these newly minted degrees?  What academic programs would these new scholars populate, and who in turn would be their students? Continue reading “Another Brick in the (Ivory) Wall by Natalie Weaver”

Time Traveling Letter to Kids of the 70s (especially you, Natalie) by Natalie Weaver

Hmmm…. Time Travel?  Maybe, I suppose.  I recall a strange video clip in which Steven Hawking throws a Time Travelers’ Party.  He sends an invitation for a fancy soiree, holds the event, and sets the scene where future folk will find a welcome reception at specific coordinates in the past, should they find the means to get there.

Then, there’s the Baby and Bird pub in Oxford, England, where the famed Inklings writers convened to share manuscripts.  There was a curious tile in the wall of one of the more private rooms, wherein, while drinking my Pimm’s Cup, I was told by some cat playing cards that Tolkien, Lewis, and company made a pact to use that tile as a sort of gathering horcrux, if they discovered they could get meet up again after crossing into the world beyond.  I can imagine that conversation among pipe-smoking guys in tweed, very seriously stacking their hands together, imbuing their spirits into a piece of decorative ceramic.  I hope it is a true story.  I’ve heard enough Brian Greene to appreciate theoretically how perhaps skipping ahead to the future is possible.

My greatest sympathy, though, for the time theorists goes to my old professor, who used to pray for things to be different in his past.  He said he believed God could change anything.  I thought it was eccentric, and I sort of think he was praying for particular events and things to actually have been different.  I admit, his level of specificity is hard for me to brook, but the concept makes a measure of sense when I consider that a person’s past is still actively present in her or his personhood insofar as we are constantly remembering, revaluing, and reintegrating ourselves in one way or another.

From a transcendental personal perspective, things that are decades old condition certain meanings, values, and tolerances in the present self. I have lunch with a friend every couple of months, and there is a never a visit that goes by in which she does not recount and somehow integrate the experience of having a gun pointed at her head.  Our stories, especially how we re-member them, great and small, live on in us.  It occurs to me even as I write that our conditioning is not even our own exclusively; we carry legacies of the human and cultural past in our embodied presents.  And, we presume the future every time we make a promise.

I am reminded of St. Augustine here and largely persuaded to appreciate the value of recognizing something like a perpetual NOW: Continue reading “Time Traveling Letter to Kids of the 70s (especially you, Natalie) by Natalie Weaver”

Saving Joan of Arc by Natalie Weaver

I’m finished with my first semester as a studio arts major at Kent State University.  I am not sure whether I’ll be registering for a second one.  There were pros and cons about the experience, and I am not sure if one set outweighed the other. Regardless, I am on sabbatical this spring, have two books to complete, and figured I would do well not to be trekking back and forth in an hours worth of snow and ice over the next few months from my home to the school.  So, I am taking a semester off, and I have become one of those retention risks. I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on the experience with only minimal consequence to my bank account and my (laughing) future in the arts.

It wasn’t a bad experience; it wasn’t a good one either, really.  I learned some things in drawing, but I am very much on the fence about my experience in sculpture.  For starters, I imagined playing with clay and making pinch pots while some Swayzesque spirit from beyond rubbed my shoulders.  Instead, I was more Jessica Beal with a welding mask, except, instead of wearing a swanky black leotard and off-the-shoulder-slouch-dance tunic, I was wearing ugly jeans and steal-toed shoes under the green welding suit that had half-dollar size holes in it.  The protective gear only partially worked; I was scared of the tools after a classmate almost lost a finger; and the top of my hair went up in smoke when a spark shot under my ill-fitting Vader hat on week two.  I put it out quickly, fortunately.

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At the Altar of the Muses by Natalie Weaver

I was asked by my sculpture teacher to make a monument.  “A monument to what,” I asked? “Anything,” he answered.  The only parameter seemed to be that the work was produced in wood.  Having seen some interesting stone and marbleizing paints, I had the immediate idea to transform the wood into a marble-like appearance.  Marble, for some reason, probably because it is the cemetery standard, seemed like the right medium for a monument to me.

All the students in the class intuitively thought of death-related concepts.  A monument to death itself was suggested.  A monument to failed works of art, another student offered.  A monument to broken tools.  Several students suggested something like coffins, since, well, they are made of wood.  I thought of death too at first.  I asked myself whom was I wanting to pedestalize, monumentalize, and memorialize.

Continue reading “At the Altar of the Muses by Natalie Weaver”

Neither My Duty nor My Honor by Natalie Weaver

Just the other day, I realized that discussion of my housekeeping has been a fairly regular conversation throughout my life.  One of my earliest memories is being about four years old in my yellow bedroom on Ruth Avenue in North Canton, Ohio, sitting amidst what seemed like a mountain of stuff.  I was trying to organize and put it away at my mother’s behest.  I had a red bandana tied across the top of my hair, and I was pressed up against a large cardboard box decorated with Disney’s slapstick hero, Donald Duck.  I was young and apparently had not learned how to differentiate all my consonants, because, as the story goes, I complained that all I ever did was “cwean, cwean, cwean!”

As a teenager in my mauve bedroom on Demington Avenue in Canton, Ohio, my sister and I, who shared a bedroom, were under the constant scrutiny of our stepfather.  I don’t remember it being exceptionally messy in there; the space was probably maintained better than average for kids our age, but the house was managed like the army.  Once, the appearance of the room was sufficiently troubling as to result in the removal of our bedroom door from its hinges.  I am still not sure what the purpose of this weird punishment was (humiliation?), but I recall feeling this to be one of the lowest points in my whole housecleaning career. Continue reading “Neither My Duty nor My Honor by Natalie Weaver”

Gaining Perspective by Natalie Weaver

I don’t know if I could be a deep-sea welder.  I don’t know what the risks of lethal electrocution, broken limbs, or the bends would be.  I suspect it can be a dangerous occupation, like operating heavy equipment on good old dry land or fishing for crab or even collecting garbage from the neighbors’ driveways.  So too is this the case with window washing, paving, disposing of medical waste, brick making, driving a giant tanker truck, and more.  There are aspects of the world I know I take for granted, but the moment I stop to consider what those aspects might be, I am humbled and reminded of the privilege it is to philosophize and ponder the functions of religion in the shaping and making of society.

I have a newfound, barely there insight, both on my privilege and my need to be wiser, derived from the use of (hold your breath) a yardstick.  In what is either a desperate gambit for meaning or the fulfillment of a dream long deferred, I returned to school to take some art classes this fall.  I have my own homework, assignments, a syllabus, and, gasp, grades to worry about for the first time since 2003.  As I drove in the dark and rain for almost an hour this morning at 6:00 am, to a parking lot that sits a solid half hour away from the bus I need to take, which deposits me a fifteen minute walk from the building where I study, in order to make a 7:45 am start time, I wondered briefly what I was doing and why.  But, as soon as I took out my yardstick to measure and represent objects in perspective, I remembered why I undertook such an errand. Continue reading “Gaining Perspective by Natalie Weaver”