Beautiful Things

"Beautiful Things" by Gungor
All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

You make me new, You are making me new
You make me new, You are making me new

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us


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Lord, make something beautiful out of me. Amen.

Photographs From My Travels

Oh, how I long to leave my responsibilities behind and travel the world more. As much as I adore Hawai'i and love being home, I still can't flip through pictures from the past five months I spent living in Europe without getting teary-eyed. I miss it more than I've let myself believe for the past month and a half that I've been back. I miss the tea-drinking, different foods, accents, changing environments, stunning sceneries, and constant adventures. Above all, I miss Oxford and the wonderful friends and memories I made there. The moment I stepped onto the plane that took me back to the states, my mind already began wandering to my next potential travel destinations: Bali, Thailand, New Zealand, Morocco, India...The possibilities seem endless in my mind. And that's the thing about traveling: it's addicting. More so, I wholeheartedly believe traveling is a crucial part in the development of a person. In the words of Mark Twain, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." However, at this moment I need to learn to enjoy home and the incredible beauty Hawai'i has to offer. In the mean time, here are 20 of my favorite photographs taken during my travels over the past few years. I have so many beautiful memories associated with each of these pictures. Enjoy!

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“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”                                                -MARK TWAIN                                         

A photograph taken from a train in Germany. The bright yellow flowers captivated me.

The Colosseum | Rome, Italy

New York City, New York

This place made me feel like I was in prehistoric times | Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Halema`uma`u Crater | Kilauea, Hawai'i

The Alps | Innsbruck, Austria

There is something so beautiful about the contrast of the ocean and dried lava | Punalu'u Beach, Hawai'i

A beautiful castle in Scotland

US-Mexico Border | Tijuana, Mexico

Paris, France

Hi'ilawe Waterfall | Waipio Valley, Hawai'i

A photo taken from the balcony of a cruise ship in Alaska

A photo taken on Skid Row on the hottest day in LA's history (high of 113 degrees) | Los Angeles, CA

An island in Greece

Stairway to Heaven hike (4,000 steps up the side of the Ko'olau Mountains) | Kapiolani, Hawai'i

Landscape Arch | Arches National Park, Utah

Found at one of my favorite beaches in the world | Kua Bay, Hawai'i

Yosemite National Park

I pulled to the side of the road to take a picture of this beautiful rainbow in Halsing, Denmark.

My second home | Oxford, England

I Open My Eyes and am Frightened by What I See

I

I open my eyes and am frightened by what I see.

I don’t know where I am, and I can’t remember how I got here.

I squint my eyes, desperately seeking anything familiar in the foreign shadows.

I close them, count to three, and open them again,

But nothing has changed.

I continue to do this until days, weeks, months go by unnoticed,

And each time I open my eyes I am more startled than before.

I am confused, dazed, disoriented; my body shivers.

I frantically reach out into the darkness and expect you to rescue me;

You always rescue me.

But I cannot find your strong, comforting hand.

The cold air rushes between my fingers as they stretch out in desperation.

Eventually I give up; you aren’t coming.

And so I cry, cry, cry,

My sorrow screaming and reaching across the depths of this dark, empty land.

II
We used to be inseparable, you and I: two parts of a whole.

I could not feel my heart beat without feeling yours beat as well;

Your love flowed through my bloodstream, into my core,

Awakening and pumping life into my sleeping soul.

Your thoughts were my thoughts, and your voice was my voice.

I remember the way my eyes would tear up when your warm whispers tickled my ears.

You said you were delighted by me,

By me!

Oh, how I loved you.

I remember sitting on the beach with you,

Running my fingers through the sand and remembering your promises fulfilled.

I heard your breathing in the sound of waves flooding in and out over the shore;

The wind rustling through the evergreens was your quiet voice singing me a sweet 
    lullaby.

Your eyes sparkled in each sunset’s rays and the glow of heaven’s stars,

The touch of your hand was more familiar than my own mother’s.

Before my breath had time to whisper your name,

You were there.

My heart overflowed with gratitude and life!

Our hearts were intertwined like wild, unkempt garden vines;

You were everything to me.

III
But now your voice is distant, like the sound of a faint echo in a deep canyon;

I strain my ears but I cannot understand your words.

Did you see it coming? Did you try to warn me?

I cannot recall when it began, when our souls were torn apart.

One day I awoke and realized I forget what you look like when you laugh;

I can picture your face, like a still photograph, a moment frozen in time,

But I cannot make the memory come to life.

I cannot remember the tone of your chuckle or

The placement of the wrinkles at the corners of your eyes.

Time turned roaring flames to dying embers,

And I am left with a strange memory

Too clear to be a dream but too distant to be reality.

IV
I no longer know what is real and what is right.

I have given up my search for truth,

The closer I draw to what is real, the more distant your voice becomes.

I didn’t want this, you know;

Wasn’t it you who told me to

Love the poor, confront injustice, open my youthful eyes?

I thought I did this for you;

I thought this search for truth was in your name.

I look back at my old self and cringe at my naivety,

Trapped in a raging sea of fairy tales and deception.

Yet, I was certain you loved me, and I loved you back.

Now, I have found the shoreline and fought my way out of the sea of lies,

But you are nowhere in sight.

I thought knowing the truth would bring me closer to you,

But I have never felt so far.

Is it not possible to know both,

To see the oppression of a people, but still believe you remember them?

To witness the abuse of power, but believe you are in control?

To encounter hatred around every corner, but know your love can overcome it?

V
I no longer recognize the world I live in, the life I have.

I don’t know how to find you, which road to take;

Everything once familiar is now foreign.

Maybe I was destined to a life

Wandering this Road to Nowhere.

I shift from home to home, continent to continent,

But I am never comfortable, never content.

Suddenly I find myself numb to your joy and beauty

And instead feel the intense, stabbing pain of human suffering.

Numbness as submission, rejection, protection.

As my soul’s final attempt at being okay,

A survival mechanism.

I have drained my heart of too many feelings, my eyes of too many tears,

And the well is now drier than summers in the Sahara.

I try to believe you want me to find my way back to you,

But I don’t think I do.

I want to feel your love as I once did,

But sometimes I don’t believe I can.

You tell me everyone makes mistakes, that you still love me.

I don’t believe you; I am ashamed.

I look at the life-size dolls of perfection around me;

They are foolish, manicured, deceived,

But I secretly envy them.

The phrase “Ignorance is bliss” has never been truer.

I struggle to believe the one they love is the same one I love;

Is one a counterfeit, a conjuring of the imagination?

Maybe it was a dream, or maybe this is a dream;

Maybe I am the foolish one, and not they;

Maybe I am yet a child and my “reality” is only my silly imagination.

I am so lost and flawed,

All I want is to believe you love me anyway.

Please, Lord, show me this is true and

Believe me when I tell you my delicate heart cannot be broken

Again.

I really do need to read this book.

"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."


-On the Road by Jack Kerouac

There is no place like Oxford.

"In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one."

                                                                            -Oscar Wilde

I cannot believe the time has come for me to leave this beautiful place. As ready as I am to travel around Europe and to eventually go home to Hawai'i, it breaks my heart a little to leave. Looking back at the first day I arrived in Oxford 3 months ago, I was in utter disbelief as I stared out the window of the bus at the endless castles, cobblestone streets, quaint caffes, cozy bookshops, and other beautiful sights. Even from an unbiased view, I really believe Oxford has a pretty strong shot at being the most beautiful city in the world. After traveling around a bit and seeing a few other cities around England, I have come to the conclusion that England is beautiful, but no place has come remotely close to the beauty and artistic perfection found in Oxford. I feel so blessed to have lived here and been able to call this place my home for the past few months. I assimilated into the culture and way of life here with ease, and maybe some day I will return to study or live here again. Thank you, Oxford, for your academic challenges, artistic enrichment, new perspectives, and beautiful culture. You have added to the growing list of places I have made "home" over the past years of my life. There really is no other place in this world quite like you. 

Change.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.” —Leo Tolstoy

Space Paintings

I'm in awe.

The pain of a goodbye

Even after my constant moving to and from and in between various places in the past few years, somehow goodbyes never get any easier for me. I get sad when I leave Hawaii after summers and Christmas, I cried when I left Yosemite after living there for 4 months, and I get very sentimental every time I leave my friends at APU. Though my semester in inner city LA was the most difficult time in my college life, the hardest part was saying goodbye to my little host sister. Now the time is coming and passing when I am having to say goodbye to Oxford and the people I have grown close to here. I know everyone hates goodbyes (to some extent), but they seem to be a lot more difficult for me than is typical. I tend to love people very easily and openly, and even if we are not necessarily "best friends" when it comes time to leave, I cannot help but simply dread the moment that inevitably comes when we part ways. It does not matter if we are best friends or close friends or even just roommates, I see beyond what the friendship is at that moment and see instead the potential for what it could have been. 

In the past few years, after studying abroad for 3 of my 6 semesters in college, I have really begun to understand just how realistic (or unrealistic) it is to maintain a long distance friendship. Friends I thought I was really close to when I left APU (or Hawaii or LA or High Sierra) simply would not make the effort to stay in touch. There were times in LA when, even though I was only a 35 minute car ride away from APU, I felt so disconnected from most friends at APU that I honestly might as well have been halfway around the world. Despite how hurtful it sometimes is and how much it forces me to question a lot of my friendships with people, it really does show you which friends care and are there long-term. It distinguishes those friends who will remember you and are willing to put actual effort into the friendship from those whose attention is dependent upon physical presence and whose biggest effort to stay in touch consists of a FB post once every few months. Excuses of having difficult classes, working extra hours, or doing extra curriculars have all come to sound the same to me. In reality, we're all busy, and I've come to discover that busyness is actually quite irrelevant in determining whether or not a person will stay in touch or put effort into maintaining a long distance friendship. You'll make time for those people you care about and want to make time for. And for the others, distance will likely cause you to simply forget. There are a few friends in my life who, after managing to put up with my study abroad addiction and life in the far off land of Hawai'i, I am actually very confident will be important people in my life for a long, long time. As hard as studying abroad continues to be on my friendships with people, it has made me so much more thankful for those certain friends who have consistently made an effort to stay strongly present in my life through it all. 

I think a lot of the anxiety and sadness I feel when saying goodbyes simply stems from the fact that I know when I say goodbye to many of these people, it really does mean goodbye. I've been forced to learn that not everyone stays in touch as they claim they will, and even with skype, facebook, and other technological inventions, distance really is one of the biggest challenges in a friendship. I don't think the day will ever come when I get better at goodbyes, but thank the Lord for people in my life who make it so difficult to say goodbye to.

A Last Glance

Goodbye…

Tears come streaming

And my lips start trembling;

I guess I always knew it had

To end.

Kimberley Winther
March 2011

Life.

Sometimes I have moments where I suddenly realize I basically have no idea what I'm doing with my life. My dreams and aspirations seem to change with each new day and mood I am in. I dream of everything from journalism to counseling to traveling the world to teaching to creating art, and more. I've switched my major more times than I even remember, and the weird thing is that I've actually enjoyed every one of them. I feel like I've had so many unique experiences, jobs, and opportunities, but they are scattered out over a broad range of subjects. Sometimes I love this fact, and other times I think "Where is this going?" I only have one year left of my undergraduate studies, and that freaks me out a little. But I guess that's all part of life, right?

Homelessness

"What kind of problem might homelessness be, if not a housing problem? One common although profoundly wrong theory can be dismissed at once- the opinion expressed by Ronald Reagan and others that the homeless are homeless by choice. The implication of this viewpoint is that homelessness results from an exercise of personal will, not from mental illness, substance abuse, or an inadequate supply of low-income housing. In this view, homelessness is simply not a problem and the homeless are perceived, perhaps, as romantic vagabonds who have traded the rat race of modern urban civilization for a life uncomplicated by mortgage or rent payments, ringing telephones, surly bosses, nagging spouses, and truculent children.

However widespread such a viewpoint may be, no credible scholar who has studied the problem of homelessness takes it seriously. One does read occasionally about a homeless person with a locker full of cash in the bus station, or about a former Wall Street stockbroker who cashed it all in for the romance of life on the road, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, homeless people live as they do because they lack the means to live in any other way, not because they have positively chosen a life of destitution and degradation over some attainable alternative means of living.


Consider what a homeless person would choose by choosing to be homeless. The rate of AIDS infection among the homeless exceeds that in the general population by a factor of 10; the rate of sexual assault on homeless women exceeds that of women in general by a factor of 20; the rate of tuberculosis among the homeless exceeds that in the population at large by a factor of about 100; and the average age of death for homeless men is somewhere around 53 years old. One does not 'choose' to sleep in the gutters or scavenge food from dumpsters."

-James D. Wright and Beth A. Rubin in Understanding Homelessness: New Policy and Research Perspectives

Anyone who doesn't believe there is inequality in the U.S. should read this article:

CLICK HERE TO READ!

"This is America"

I.


If a democracy puts power in the hands of the people,

America is not a democracy.

It is a place where Congressmen worth

Hundreds and millions of dollars

Vote more tax cuts of money that could have helped

The single mother, sickly child, or hungry worker.

 It is a nation whose leaders throw words like

Capitalism, Patriotism, Equalism

At its people and label the rest as

Socialism or COMMUNISM,

But really it is just greed and individualism.

It is a country where leaders distract the public

With thoughts of gay marriage and abortion

And avoid real issues of poverty, inequality, discrimination,

Shifting the public’s gaze from reality, and succeeding!

Suddenly the focus is on issues affecting some minority,

Instead of the systemic problems changing the lives of the 
      majority.

Everything in the name

Of money, power, fame;

That’s America for you.

II.

There is something wrong in a society where

Budget cuts take social programs from the poor

And leave untouched the excess of the rich.

I pledge allegiance to the Flag

Of the United States of America

Where everything must be made cheaper,

And consumers only get richer.

Fingerprints of India or China on every shirt and gadget;

These workers exploited, abused, used,

But no one cares because

Out of sight out of mind, right?

And to the Republic for which it stands

Accumulating wealth becomes an end in itself

Rather than a means to some societal good.

Overwhelming greed and individualism

In a nation marked by Christiandom.

One nation under God

Capitalism now a justification for inequality;

Racism and anti-migrationism

In this “melting pot” with its

Immigration foundation.

Indivisible

Equal opportunity promised in this nation

Where CEOs get richer, ignoring worker cares,

And half of our Congressmen are millionaires.

Sometimes I think I’m living in

A country of contradictions.

With liberty and justice for all.

III.

This country only one in two hundred,

A microscopic splotch on a map of the world;

One small piece, but we think it’s the whole.

Our vision of all else remains clouded,

And thoughts of others are hurled

Because compassion and understanding are not the goal.

Struggles in Libya or Egypt, no matter how urgent,

Are somehow made irrelevant.

IV.

We are like plastic dolls on a conveyor belt,

Emotion and pain unfelt,

Emerging from the factory that is America,

Cold and lifeless before they imprint data.

Uncle Sam furtively forming our minds

Through words and the media that blinds,

Having us believe we hold unique opinions,

But in reality we have no say in our decisions.

We are only plastic dolls;

Our inability and numbness appalls.

With Made in the USA stamped on our backs,

Uncaring of our actions and their impacts,

Clones of each other

Or, more accurately, of our political leaders.

Through the media, each person manufactured,

Each thought filtered

Of things like injustice and oppression,

Taught to respond but never to question.

Hearts beating, but never alive fully,

A prison of tamed souls in the land of the free.

Passion and wisdom not missed in their absence;

Oblivious to own ignorance and indifference.

None will accuse this country, where their ancestors dwelt.

Still just plastic dolls on a conveyor belt.

V.

Waiting for the scales to drop from your eyes;

Waiting, hoping, pleading, waiting,

But they never drop.

Left dwelling in some inauthentic existence,

Like abandoned matter

From some reckless child’s science experiment,

Threatened by screaming statistics

Of the discrepancies, inequalities, realities,

Only to forget them a moment later:

Forgetting as a method of protection.

Excuses handed to us

Like a lollipop handed to a child

To keep him from crying:

A distraction, deflection, deception.

Maybe tomorrow you will wake up

From this deep, deep slumber;

Maybe tomorrow you will ask questions

And find your own answers;

Then maybe this world will be a little better

And America will have some future.

Standing here

Dreaming and waiting for tomorrow,

But it never comes;

Tomorrow never comes.

By Kimberley Winther

February 2011