who am I? – hannah ananas

I am from…

Recently, in my cleaning out, I’ve come across loads of papers and files and folders and binders from almost all of my years of schooling. While, I’ve found things from that same school year (lots of them today, actually), I have yet to find the original I am from poem that I wrote about myself in seventh grade. When I find it, I will share it, followed by the one I wrote about myself during college, as well as the two(three?) that my friends wrote about me from their own perspectives during, I believe, high school together.

For now, though, I share the one I wrote during college about myself. If you do not know, an I am from poem is essentially a work where one inputs pieces of information related to certain topics. For example, the format could be as follows:

[First Name]
I am from [three traits you like about yourself]
[three traits you want to improve about yourself]
lover of [two things you love]
believer in [two things in which you believe]
who fears [two things you fear]
who hopes for [two things for which you hope]
brother/sister to [list your siblings]
daughter/son to [list your parents’ names]
resident of [the street where you grew up living]
[your city and state]
[your country]
[Last Name]

The original one I did was longer than that, but the point was just to explain the general format, so I’ll leave it at that. The following, as mentioned already, is the version I wrote in college, which was following a rather free format that did not have distinct criteria other than being about ourselves (so far as I currently remember, anyway).

……………………………

4 Sept 2011 ED351

Hannah
I am from gentle, caring, lovable, wonderful
I am from sisterhood and subtle observations
from Music and Dance and Poetry
I am from contentedness with what one is given, blissfulness when around music, and the desire to do good
I am from hugs, laughs, and love, and recycling it all back
I am from giving harmony to life, consideration to call, and cheerfulness to one’s surroundings
I am from confidence: one so strong I fear only a loss of things or people whom I love and with whom I share my life
I am from Grace, in name and in action
I am from “How do you say ‘How do you say?'” in as many languages as possible
I am from connectedness and communication: be honest, be clear, be concise, lift up others with what you say, and mean it every time
I am from clarity: now inhale deeply and be with what is and what isn’t – identify the story and render it powerless in what happened
I am from when you’re on it, get off it; when you’re incomplete, get complete with yourself and with all those involved; and when you’re being inauthentic, be authentic about your being inauthentic
I am from live in the moment and remember what’s possible
AND
I am from the long time sun, may it always shine upon you
I am from love, may it always surround you
I am from Woman, the greatest power, and from the one pure light within us
I am from a world to be treated with care
I am from mother: Earth and the human
I am from understanding, consciousness, choices, and freedom of self-expression
I am from mother, all-encompassing, all-loving, and ever-present
I am from God, the World, and the stars
I am from Mother

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Post-a-day 2018

So, what are you?

Today, I share something I received yet again in the e-mail for yesterday. I love the quote in it, and something similar lives always within me in my everyday life. I say and have said for years, “We are what we eat, and we are what we think about all day long.” And I ask myself, “So, what am I? What are my thoughts? What am I thinking about all day?”

I now ask you the same. Who and what are you? What do you eat, and what do you think about all day long? What words do you think (even if you do not say them)? And what would you like to think?

I do a regular cleansing, so to speak, of my own thought patterns and language. I evaluate what words and thoughts I have been using and entertaining, but which do not suit the self that I want to be. And I make a conscious, daily, minute-to-minute effort to think the thoughts and use the words that I want myself to think and to use.

And I always feel so – for lack of any other way of describing it – clean afterward. It almost feels like bathing, slowly but surely.

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JANUARY 9

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

– SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought. We do not have to be afraid of negative thoughts as long as we do not welcome them. They are in the air, and they may knock at anyone’s door; but if we do not embrace them, ask them in, and make them our own, they can have no power over us.

We can think of thoughts as hitchhikers. At the entrance to the freeway, we used to see a lot of hitchhikers carrying signs: “Vancouver,” “Mexico,” “L.A.” One said in simple desperation, “Anywhere!” Thoughts are a lot like those hitchhikers. We can pick them up or pass them by. Negative thoughts carry signs, but usually we see only one side, the side with all the promises. The back of the sign tells us their true destination: sickness and sorrow.

Nobody is obliged to pick up these passengers. If we do not stop and let them in, they cannot go anywhere, because they are not real until we support them. There is sympathy in the world: pick it up. There is antipathy in the world: don’t pick it up. Hatred destroys. Love heals.

The Thought for the Day is today’s entry from Eknath Easwaran’s Words to Live By.
You can view the Thought for the Day on our website

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Post-a-day 2018

My real voice

In college, I spent a summer studying in Germany. It was a language school setup, filled with foreigners, but in such a small town that everyone knew that we were studying German, and so everyone always spoke to us all in German. I had already studied abroad a few times before this adventure, and I had learned firsthand about what works and what doesn’t work, in terms of language immersion. I was dedicated to learning German, and so I made sure that I only spoke in German with others, even if they spoke to me in English. This made friendships hard among the people in my program’s group, since they all used English together; I came across a bit snobby, but I was just really committed to learning German.

I made friends with other foreigners rather easily, though, and especially ones in higher levels of German, which was even better for me. My German was improving immensely. But this led to a unique situation one day.

One day, near the end of either my time at the school or my friend Paul’s time there (he’s British), I found myself faced with a desperate Paul, actually begging me to speak English. Why?! was my repeated question to his pleas.

“Because I want to hear what you sound like!”

I don’t know if he was pleased or not by how I sound in English, but I spoke a little for him. And it was way weird, using English with him, despite the fact that I’d heard him speak English loads, and that it’s our common native language. I had just never used it with him.

And then this brought up a unique and interesting sentiment. He wanted to hear me, and that meant speaking English. I can guess that my native tongue was the one in which Paul believed my identity to lie. I know that it felt like I was setting aside a sort of mask when I switched to English with him. I even felt a little called-out… as though I had been hiding somehow, and it had been behind German. The real me (I) lay in English, in the English part of me.

Yet, years later, here I am, missing the parts of me that belong to these different languages in which I have lived. A part of me, true me (I), exists only on German, and others in French, in Spanish, and in Japanese. So much so that the real me (I) is this whole combination of languages – I feel a huge emptiness and feel not myself when I am using only English in my daily life. I listen to Spanish-speaking radio when I’m in Houston, mostly because I don’t get to use Spanish often enough. I read every night in French, and trade off an English book for a German one at times for my evening reading, too. I regularly pull out a Spanish book to read, or my German audiobooks. And I have noticed that I have been searching for a tolerably satisfying way to have Japanese in my near-daily life, too. (For now, it has just been the occasional music, and a perpetual repeat of a certain song being stuck in my head.) When I don’t have them all, it is as though a part of me is missing, and suddenly getting to speak with someone in them, almost reminds me of that mask I was setting aside in Germany with Paul… like I am again setting aside some mask I have been wearing.

Perhaps it is now a mask of monolingualism, pretending that I only speak English, while I long for the world to talk to me in several languages, all the time.

Anyway… I’m exhausted. And I miss Paul. He was studying opera, and was a really great guy. I wonder if he’s been really successful with opera these past several years. Maybe I can go see him perform one day. That would be awesome. 🙂

Post-a-day 2017