dainty dirty hands

some author whose name unfortunately escapes me once commented that humans' big brains and dextrous hands have cause us centuries of suffering and destruction. war. politics. religions. hate. murder. rape. technology. industrialization.

somehow i can't seem to get the image of 160 shining faces looking at me from their seats in my classroom, anxiously awaiting my spoken directions and gestures as to what we would be learning for the day in english class. i think of the games i played with kids, the walls i painted for the children's home, the words i repeated persistently, all the countless gestures and movements and expressions we made with our hands to try and desperately communicate with one another when our words fell short of meaning or comprehension. i think of all the ways we touched, pointed, tickled, screamed, engineered, and planned as we spend hours with the children, teachers, fathers, pastors, mothers, and merchants of thailand. if not for our big, complicated brains, would we be able to speak or have the ingenuity of creatively connecting with one another? if not for our hands, the same no matter what size, shape, or color, would we have had a medium for telling and showing these kids our love, our personalities, our stories and theirs? suffering will always exist, for the human race is incredibly primitive, selfish, and at times far away from god.

yet goodness, joy, beauty, and communion with god is the ultimate progosis for us homosapiens, and if not for our brilliantly engineered bodies and minds, we would have very little capacity to know, to relate, to build, to create, to embrace and imagine...to be...human

"god has made everything beautiful in its time. he set eternity on the hearts of men but we cannot fathom what he has done from beginning to end. there is nothing better than to be happy and to do good while we live- to find satisfaction in our toil, that is the gift of god" -ecclesiastes 3.10

thailand. san diego. colorado. dirty smiling faces. pretty business places. new people, new ideas. ancient disciplines and modern technologies. organic communal creativity. working through emotions, ascending personal mountains, confronting social and economical crises. questions of faith and science, of love and of duty. of god and of bacteria. but having an understanding and an ability to see good in things, to practice peace, to overflow with joy in the midst of clouded horizons....that is living life to the full, is it not? that is the gift of life and the definition of this journey we're all on, is it not?

cast down your idols...and draw instead your wind chimes

we arrived at the facade of the Bandawat (the largest Buddhist temple area in Chiang Mai)and i was struck especially by the stark contrasts of man's constructed images of glistening gold, twinkling jewels, colors, bright shapes, stone relics of bird and elephant at the feet of the overly large Buddha statue. The chimes whispered so eerily in that warm silent evening, only adding to the bizarre sense that all this beauty and wealth signifying the importance and strength of Buddha was cast all to dull against the breathaking and brilliant design of god's natural dwelling place, his glorious, green, lush, unlimited landscape of forever-stretching-forests, misty-jungle-mountains, and high-stormy-skies...

though i was able to spend considerable time walking the premises, meditating in the temple rooms, breathing slowly in the sacred spaces, trying to understand and appreciate the culture and teachings of this place while also immersing myself in prayer and worship of god, surrounded by gold shimmering creatures and jewel eyed teachers, flooded my soul became with the need and the great capacity for closeness with god. i was less impressed by the bold statues, the brilliant gold and silver buildings, the colorful windows and floors, and completely taken aback by the grandeur and delicate promise evident in the most outstanding, bright rainbow that found its home softly between the storm clouds and the pure white puffs of radiance that stretched out across the sky in the background.

deep breaths as i stood in the middle of a huge, empty stone garden, listening to the windchimes dance and sing in the leaves, in the spirit of the trees, his song maybe flowing through me and all the other things...

finding the joy bird

sometimes we get lost. lost while driving. lost in physical storms. lost in the deeper, personal storms. lost while in love. feeling lost on spiritual journeys when we're really not lost at all, we just don't have a sense of where we're supposed to be going.

there are so many indicators for us simple beings, indicators for direction and guidance. i've always trusted that god has a delicately crafted plan for my life and i look to him for direction, for confidence, for hope. some people look for guidance in other forms and sometimes direction comes in the most surprising shapes and colors...that buzzing feeling deep inside of your gut spurring you on towards a decision or an adventure... or a song that continually rings right down within your chest, a song you can't ignore and can't be separated from because it is in you, it is part of you, it is you. i also think this song is god, his spirit and his energy moving within me, leading me towards the things i am naturally led to.

my best friend once told me that if i ever lost hold of my joyful spirit, my soul song, that she would 'backstroke through the muck to retrieve my joy bird'. i'm convinced that His song will never leave me, that though i will travel far, experience thick struggle and disappointment, maybe even feel disconnected from god, his song that is deep within me will always give me direction, will always give me a fresh breath and a a clear direction.

as humans relating to other humans, we are all connected, indefinitely. 'we are pieces of others. portraits painted between our brains and thymuses. we are the dirt we've eaten and the songs we've sung. we are the light of stars and darkness old beyond imagining. we are at once spontaneous fires & sacred water. we are faith and forgiveness'-Gerard Callahan

in looking for direction, for options, for encouragement, besides looking to the one who indefinitely supplies us with hope, joy and perseverance, restores our spirits and gives us a song to sing, we must look to those people around us who may feel equally lost and swirling in the midst of creation. we must pursue connectivity and unity to one another; we must see god within each other and remind each other of the melody should we ever forget or lose our place...

'create in me a clean heart, o god, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.do not cast me from your presence or take your holy spirit from me, but restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me' -psalm 51.10-

thailand: cultural explosions

i'm starting this new season of life, this portion of my personal life narrative, in media res, which in literary terminology means in the middle. i'm not quite sure what this chapter in my story is called. its somewhere in between student and adult, child and professional, listener and leader. becoming an adult means realizing and taking responsibility for the paradoxical nature of life and taking action for what moves you. having just traveled halfway across the world to spend time volunteering in Thailand, i think i am just now coming to terms with this notion, just finally arriving at some minuscule understanding of what it is that moves me, and where that movement is focused now...

i'm not sure the best way to go about recording my experiences from this trip, which is why this story will be disorganized and maybe completely illogical. but there's a delicious ambiguity to it. ...some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. my story is long underway, constantly being improvised, altered, constantly catching me off guard and teaching me in more ways than i would ever have expected...


if you think about it, culture is truly derived from a certain group of people's relationship to the land they inhabit. how they use its resources, how they survive together, how they express themselves and enjoy life in whichever manner comes naturally. at first, thailand the country and especially thai culture seemed to be something absolutely foreign to me, something that i would never quite understand or be able in any major way to take part. but after spending the last three weeks immersed in thai culture, surrounded by the most majestic, lush forests i have ever seen, befriending small, beautiful children with whom i can just get by communicating, and experiencing a surpassing degree of self reflection and inspiration, i'm getting more and more familiar with the word, culture...

thailand is all about ceremony, about respect, tradition, taking life slowly and savoring everything. my initial perceptions of this country were of a somewhat impoverished nation simply trying to survive, using food stands, markets, cell phone booths and other miscellaneous business and community centers as a means to creating and maintaining an economy. i wasn't attuned to the beauty of the culture, of the more subtle efforts at pursuing education, the arts, spirituality.

i didn't realize that these are a people who do still have some sort of relationship with the earth-their lifestyles and means of making money mostly revolve around the tending of the rice fields, the harvesting of fruit and vegetables, making fiber paper out of washed and dried elephant dung, using the plants and trees and natural resources to make housing, clothing, cookware, entertainment, hardware.

culture comes from relationships and i'm beginning to examine the idea of a one world culture, where we embrace unity rather than uniformity and begin to share with one another these various cultures, practices, understandings. its not something to differentiate humans from one another but rather to celebrate the beauty of our diverse race, our different needs and talents and habits and our creativity and dependency on the earth...

finished...now it all begins....

"Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love endures forever...this is the day the Lord has Made; I will rejoice and be glad"

These are the words, the ideas, the state of being I am left with as I finish up my last final exam, experience my last time sitting as a student in a classroom at Point Loma, turn in my very last major literature analysis...

I'm all smiles. The day is bright, my life is light, I'm blessed beyond belief and I find myself in the most delicate, nourishing soil as I embark on new journeys...

Here's to the end of a season, an amazing four years of growth, laughter, memories, tears, and to the beginning of everything new and bright and big and beautiful...

language

language is never a permanent fixture; therefore we do not have access to these 'universal truths' that keep getting mentioned and discussed because language is all we have to understand truth and meaning, yet ours is so completely limited with respect to god... we can't even fathom the true existence and magnanimity of god or how he relates to us because we are limited even in the way in which we fathom!