Sumbitted by Hillary Mohaupt


One of the remarkable things about the Internet is that you can type nearly anything into a search engine and find whatever your heart desires. In the rise and fall of the last few weeks—experiencing the loss of my grandmother, getting my first acceptance letters for graduate schools, struggling with the snobbish side of Macalester’s culture, celebrating with a friend as she comes to know herself a little better by embracing the sexuality with which she has wrestled—I have been drawn back to a sentence I found years ago.

Sometime during my first year at Mac, I encountered the gentle reminder, “Life is once, twice and yet again.” I taped it on my computer monitor and it has hung there patiently, waiting for me to find it again this week. When I did find it, I wanted to contextualize it. So I turned to Google for help. The first few searches came up fruitless, and I was closer to distress than to annoyance. Here was a line that was speaking to my experience and I couldn’t even remember who wrote it!

But tonight, Google came through. Naly Yang’s poem, “In Remembrance,” appeared in Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans in 2002, and my sentence drew the poem to a close. As I wrap up my time at Macalester and in NNPCW, anything “in remembrance” seems particularly apt. As we remember, we re-experience and re-interpret.
There is hope in Naly Yang’s brief reminder. We can remember and re-interpret and even re-live what we have known, or, better, we can move on to something completely new and, dare I say, refreshing. We can renew our spirits and replenish our hearts. We are given the promise of unending love, which can transform us beyond our own experiences. God’s love in the world recalls what even Google can’t adequate convey: the darker moments will be brightened by friendships and adventures, and exuberant joy will be tempered by the call of the world to dig down deep to engage the world in hard work and complicated questions. We remember and we continue to live. In a sentence, “life is once, twice and yet again.”

Hillary is a senior at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. She is currently a member of NNPCW's Coordinating Committee, but sadly, her term ends this year. We will miss her dearly.

Thanks for those words.