Ishkabibble is what we call a brownie sundae at Highland Lodge, where I've been a waitress for the past five weeks. An ishkabibble is sort of the Lodge's signature dessert, mostly because of its name; it is a delicious, but not particularly unique, gooey combination of a brownie, vanilla ice cream, and hot fudge sauce. Today was the day of the "Great Ishkabibble", when people could get a free Ishkabibble if they completed the "Great Circle," the outer edge of the Lodge's cross country ski trails, 19 km in all. When I got home from work this evening, I curiously googled the word Ishkabibble to see if I could find what it means. What I found made me think that it would make a great title for this blog entry. Basically, Ishkabibble is a nonsense word of unknown origin, maybe a bastardization of a Yiddish term, maybe of a German phrase, meaning either "Don't worry"/"No worries", or, according to Urban Dictionary, it's "A word to use when something is indescribable, or when there's nothing else to say." Trying to sum up six weeks of living at my own pace, of skiing and working and having fun and eating well and feeling good and thinking my own thoughts and exploring and living in this beautiful rural place I love so much? Ishkabibble.
Worried that this blog post isn't going to go anywhere, that after six weeks I will prove even more incoherent than usual? Ishkabibble.
I do have a lot more to say than just "Ishkabibble," however. No worries. Ishkabibble. The reason I haven't posted in so long is that I have, as surprising as it may seem, been quite busy, particularly during the last two weeks. The inn has been really busy during the last couple weeks, and I've been working a lot. For example: I worked 45 hours in six days last week, and Friday (yesterday) was my first day off in ten days . So in the hours when I haven't been working, I've been watching movies and reading and skiing, and I haven't been inclined to update my blog. Sorry! I guess it's a hermit thing. You probably wouldn't understand (grumpy hermit?). Ishkabibble.
Working at the Lodge has been absolutely great. Being a waitress is tough work, requiring excellent multi-tasking skills, complete focus, physical and mental efficiency, as well as people skills...so it's never boring. Making money is also excellent, especially since I've made a lot more than I expected too. Yay. I'm rich! Not really. But sorta. Ishkabibble.
The people at the Lodge have been incredibly patient and welcoming. I'm definitely in a completely different place in my life than most of them, especially since this is but a transient stage (seven weeks) within a transient stage (a gap year) for me. Since I'm transient, a newbie, going to a "fancy college" (not a quote from anyone at work, but from a girl I met somewhere else in Vermont), AND a flatlander, I expected to be on the outside to a certain extent, and while I am certainly not completely integrated into the Lodge community, it is almost entirely because of the first two reasons rather than the second two. Happily, I seem to exhibit enough of a willingness to work and a decent enough allowance of common sense to have been mostly accepted by the more exigent members of the Lodge staff. Ishkabibble.
The other major component of my time up here has been cross country skiing, which I have done in abundance. On average, I've probably been skiing four days a week, and every time I go I'm blown away by the beauty here. Seriously, every time of the 25-30 times I've been skiing, I've experienced one of those "Oh my ISHKABIBBLE" moments of awe at the beauty of creation. One of my favorite spots is a trail on the Lodge's ski trails that offers a view of the "Snow Angel," a set of fields on a hill opposite that from a distance look like a snow angel. Today I skied right at dusk, just as clouds were moving in and it was starting to snow; the grey of the hills, the white of the snow angel, the light blue of the sky right above the hills, then a strip of dark grey clouds, lightening up to a blue-lavender-grey overcast sky. Somehow the combination of colors and the quality of light reminded me of the my day at Xi Hu in Huangzhou back in November. So beautiful. Ishkabbible.
Most of my deep thinking from the last six weeks has centered around the beauty around me, my personal ponderings as Lent has approached and the movies and books I've been watching and reading. For Lent, I've given up meat and Facebook...it's going to be tough, but I hope that I'll have the willpower to persevere, and that I can spend the next six weeks focusing even more on living well spiritually and connecting with myself and those I love and with the God I love, basically taking care of my body, mind, soul and relationships. I figure I'll never have an opportunity like I do this year to spend Lent really engaging and living intentionally. As far as books and movies have gone, I want to talk about three movies in particular, and how they've made me reflect on my "retreat" from "society" (to which I say: Ishkabibble). These three movies are "Into the Wild", which is based on the true story of a young man who, after graduating from college, gives away all of his money and possessions and begins a two year long odyssey to Alaska, where he intends to live purely in the wilderness (see: Thoreau) and escape the poison and hypocrisy of society. **Spoiler alert** It sounds uplifting, and some cool wilderness-y things do happen, but he dies in the end of starvation after spending three months in the Alaskan wilderness. No longer afflicted by the hypocrisy of society, yes, but also dead. Another movie was "Motorcycle Diaries", about the journey a young Che Guevara took with a friend by motorcycle from Buenos Aires (yeee) thousands of miles across South America. And the third move was "Seven Years in Tibet", also based on a true story, about an Austrian former Nazi who escapes from a British POW camp in India to wander through Tibet, before making a new life for himself in Lhasa and befriending the Dalai Lama. Cue 1949, the Communist Chinese army, and general destruction and tragedy. I loved all three of these movies, and highly recommend them to any audience, but particularly to young adults such as myself. They are all about journeys of self-discovery, and while these odysseys all involved harsh conditions in the wilderness, slogs of thousands of miles through mountains, exotic locales, and isolation and loneliness on the part of all three protagonists, in all three movies I saw elements of my own journey over the course of this gap year. I also saw depicted the arrogance of youthful rebellion, the arrogance of the young who think they are invincible, or who think that their suffering has some higher meaning or puts them on a higher plain than other people, or who think that they see or know something that no one else does. This theme made me sit back on my heels a little bit and consider my own journey, my own odyssey in search of a deeper sense of myself and, yes, my quest for a higher purpose for myself and my year off. I also saw that all three protagonists pushed away emotionally from, while also physically abandoning, their loved ones. Maybe I betray my own arrogance by claiming to see any aspect of my own experience in such amazing, lofty, completely unique stories; I am, after all, settled and not on an epic physical odyssey, and, furthermore, settled into a beautiful house surrounded by breath-taking views, in perfect comfort, completely content. I am also not seeking to break away from society, but rather to make a space for myself to reflect and grow in order that I might find my place in society. That being said, all three of the these movies--especially "Into the Wild"--have niggled their ways into my mind, into my thoughts and reflections, and I can't escape making comparisons. To a certain extent, all three characters fulfilled the role of "the voice crying out in the wilderness", of the prophet crying for truth, for justice, for the holiness and sanctity of the self in the face of society's power. I am no such voice. But I cannot help but ask myself--am I so drawn in by the pull of these movies because of a sense of jealousy? Because I want to be or--or, worse, style myself after--such a voice? And then my mind turns to Jesus, to his 40 days in the wilderness battling the devil, to his role as the ultimate prophet, as the ultimate just judge of society--and to his youth. Jesus was young, too; he, too, underwent a journey of self-discovery that led to a retreat into the wilderness. Jesus suffered, and his suffering has exquisite meaning; Jesus pushed away his loved ones; Jesus acted like he knew something that no one else did, but that was because he did know something, something of the most tremendous importance. The most poignant moment of "Into the Wild" for me was when the protagonist, Chris, writes in the margins of a book that he reads during his final days "Happiness only counts when it is shared." What I think he's referring to, in a meta-sense, is to the primacy of love over all else. Which is also a huge theme in all three movies, and which is, to my mind, the crucial center of Jesus' message and story.
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