Those black flats

Tip-toeing morning sunshine is intoxicating as it graciously sweeps over shadowed stillness. With Phil Collins, Three Dog Night, and some Bossa Nova fueling my spirit as I sit on the sleeping bus, I realize, par its failing reputation, that my body has gravitated to sit me in the only seat that neither reclines, nor has a functional arm rest. At 5 in the morning, my spine doesn’t really care that I’ve taken eight dance classes that week which teach me about proper posture and alignment. Larry the Cucumber streams into my headphones – reminding me that he’s a pirate who doesn’t do anything; and I find I’ve made it all of an hour after dawn brekky before stuffing more food into my barely-waking system.

It’s quite a frightening sensation when you smell something waft over a bus and consider that it might be coming from the shoes you just took off. You envision, in a staggering instant, societies shunning your face and friendships being severed like the limbs of a Barbie in the hands of your twisted cousin. You feel that there will soon be generous frowns from all walks of life acutely stabbing your wardrobe selections;  at the fact that such a putrid smell could come from a pair of size 7 flats. All because you chose to bring those black shoes. Those silly black shoes. The ones that may potentially be molding. The ones you wore extensively in last weekend’s persistent deluge, possessed by the evil puddles to rot in humid decay. Rain everywhere. Cats. And dogs. From … the  … sky. You knew they would betray you, but it’s the only black pair of shoes you brought to Australia.  You wanted to be different than the girl behind you who brought all the shoes she owns for the four months abroad. But now you only have this one pair that match the dress you’re wearing. And you have to wear a dress on the 7-hour bus ride because you’re going to visit Parliament. You’re happy because most everyone is asleep, and maybe they won’t notice that the bus now smells like a well-loved locker room. Maybe they will be acutely unaware of the assault to the comfort of their senses. If you were to be able to just reach the frilly, girly lotion tucked in your backpack, maybe you could confound the nostrils of those nearby. It is, of course, wedged into the deepest, darkest, most hardest-to-reach corner of the most awkwardly placed pocket furthest from your desperate fingers ….  maybe you should just chuck both the insubordinate backpack and the disloyal shoes out the window … and you can feel those frowning noses from the fastidiously analytical culture of the masses coming to shame you ….. and you just can’t find that lotion … and people are starting to wake up …. And the shoes are staring at you, mocking the distress of your soul …

And then, in a moment of insurmountable beauty, the skies open up as you realize that the awful scent is coming from outside the bus.

Crisis crushed. Boo-yah.

So you begin a carefree conversation with those who are awake (and some who really aren’t, or shouldn’t be) about Neil Patrick Harris, excrement of jellyfish, mnemonic anemones, strategic tactics for the acquisition of quarters, school buses, and fathers being pastors.

It’s going to be a good day.  

A mighty graveyard

We have all these ideas, these possibilities for accomplishment and venturing thoughts of dynamic deeds,  that get drawn out of us like ship captains who never come home. It’s as though, for every one action we take, a thousand more potential actions drown, sinking to the depths along with their homeward-bound ships; ideas that often cry out from the sea-floor in ghostly recall, but that will never come to be.

I find myself plagued with ideas. Wonderful ideas – big ones, small ones – that could make of me the most interesting and useful human specimen if I were to follow them all (or the most laughed at, but we will ignore that possibility). I could be noteworthy for my accomplishments in newspaper-clipping collages, my skills of button organization, my strides in language and literature and the making of lasagna. I could be the first to break new ground in operatic singing, and then go on to conquer the realms of bringing belly dance into the forefront of the church. I could write poems of liberation and print them on napkins, then drop the napkins from hot air balloons into the cages of imprisoned zoo animals. I could knit kites, kill roaches, and have better reflexes than a cat’s ninth life. For each one idea I pursue (often to its failing demise), infinite more are lost; however silly, or successful, they might turn out to be.

So many ideas lost. It makes me think of armies strewn about shores; dead to their lives, but deader-still to their possibilities.

We recently spoke in one of our classes about the battle of Gallipoli in WWI, fought in Europe between Australian and Turkish troops. Some of you may not realize that Australia, at the time of WWI, was only just over 100 years old, compared to America’s 500-year-plus history. The first British ships landed in Australia in 1788, compared to America’s wonderful, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and the accomplishment found in the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776.

It was said of the Battle of Gallipoli, a battle in which Australia failed miserably, that “A young nation could not afford to lose such men.” This brought out the reality that, in all the lives lost, there were thousands of potential doctors, engineers, agriculturalists, mayors, fathers and brothers and scientists and artists …. Thousands of men who would have been forces of national forward-propulsion for the young country of Australia, and for the lives of those left behind. Thousands of men with ideas, and thoughts, and potential actions that could have changed the history of a place. In response to a European request for more Australian troops to be sent to fight in the war, Billy Hughes, the Aussie Prime Minister at the time, declined, saying, “I speak for 60,000 Australian dead.”

It is a mighty graveyard, the resting place of ideas. 

The image above is from the War Memorial in Canberra. I will write more about the memorial later, but this is a portion of a boat retrieved from the site of the Battle of Gallipoli, riddled with bullet holes. It is eerie to think of what was hit by those bullets after they pierced straight through the shell. 

Cream colored ponies

Thank you to all who have sent me postcards! My face smiles : )
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I haven't written a list recently ... so here goes one ... 
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Some favorite things lately: 
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Green grapes
Pigeon-holes 
Ronnie, my Afro-Jazz teacher
The orchid blossom I found on the sidewalk this morning
Bobby pins
Watching Michael and my host mom have finger duels before tea

Garage-sale luggage

This week I had to write a blog post for my Australian Culture class, to be posted on the ASC blog. I chose to do it on the notion of "home." I figured I might as well post it here, too: 
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 It is often our intent to provide ourselves with definable peace through objective comfort. We think we know what home is, and that we know what home is made of. We think we know how to feel, and how to act, and how to rest in the place we feel we know the best. This is why we often do things like hide behind coffee, eat at McDonald’s, and carry our own pillows with us on airplanes when travelling; trying to relocate the familiar into the unfamiliar.

I speak two languages, but can effectively communicate in neither. Growing up in Brazil, I celebrated American holidays, like Thanksgiving, with things like failed jell-o molds in 100 –degree weather and Christmas with the illusion of Santa coming down a chimney in a city that hasn’t the need for fireplaces. My dad was born in Hawaii before it was a state. My mom is Latvian. I have stuff stored in a cockroach-laden attic in Rio, a church basement in Illinois, garage-sale luggage in Nebraska, a Rubbermaid tub in Washington, and a spare room in South Carolina.

May I venture that, in fact, we do not truly know what home is until we are away from what we once thought home was?

It used to make my blood boil whenever our friends in America would refer to our furloughs in the States as being “Home Assignments.” Who were they to tell my sisters and I where our home was? Who had given them the prerogative to assume America was our home? What did they know of home, beyond their concrete establishment of space and possession? These are, of course, rash reactions from a child’s mind, but I often find myself coming back to the stubborn thoughts. We love to say that “Home is where the heart is,” but how does one come to find where their heart is unless they’ve had it taken out of them? If our heart has always been in the same place, and has been held on to with an iron grip of blind dependency, we live in delusional comfort because we think we have a notion of how dear those things closest to us are.

We don’t. We can’t. We cannot know how dear they are until they are taken away, or moved, or changed.

Oswald Chambers once said, “What is it that blinds me in the ‘my day’? Have I a strange god – not a disgusting monster, but a disposition that rules me? More than once God has brought me face to face with the strange god and I thought I should have to yield, but I did not do it. I got through the crisis by the skin of my teeth and I find myself in the possession of the strange god still; I am blind to the things which belong to my peace.”

We desperately hold on to our notions of comfort. Our ideals for calm. Some of my times feeling most “at home” were when I was furthest from family, furthest from my birthplace … furthest from anything “comfortable.” --- But closest to God, and closest to who I am. An evening spent out in crisp mountain air, escaping from being found in the same place as a roommate who was hiding from the police. The feeling of driving into an awakening sun that makes all things new as you leave behind the foul motel you took harbour in. Sitting down to collect your thoughts when you realize how close you came to losing something, or someone. These things are home. Peace presented by the very presence of God.

Being in Australia, I have come to find that each person in our group, myself included, has arrived with a “disposition that rules me,” as Chambers stated. These dispositions are not disgusting monsters. They are not even necessarily bad. But they rule over us. And now we are brought face to face with these dispositions and given a chance to yield them for the purpose of seeing things clearer than we ever have before. God is presenting an opportunity to experience “home” as we never have felt it before through the offering of peace in a way we’ve never seen it before. We get to have our notions of comfort completely redefined, and our ideals for calm controlled by Him, instead of by the environment we’ve been raised in.

I am sitting in a bed at the house of people I met for the first time only four weeks ago, with trust that they will not poison the meals I am fed or stab me in the night. God has amazing ways of constantly redefining what we see as home. I am living in this peace presented by God’s presence--- and, for me --- He alone is home.

Bum Bags to Kissing Point

What do kissing, souvenirs, mandarin, pigeons,  hookahs, and avocados have in common?

Absolutely nothing.

But … today I joined three friends in exploring some new parts of Sydney. Daniel, Rachel, Tess, and I began our day at the Paddington Markets. They are very similar to the Saara markets in Rio, for those of you who have been there.  Loads of fancy nothings that you think you need in your life, but probably would do much better living without. I debated whether one might benefit from some striped thigh-high stockings, a t-shirt with “I love London” written on it (who doesn’t?), a kangaroo-testicle key chain, dried pineapple, or maybe even a cool leather fanny pack. Actually, the word “fanny” is highly offensive here. Aussies call it a “bum bag.” They like their alliterations, and are much better than we Americans at describing the nature of an object. A slide is a slippery dip. A cup of tea is a cuppa. Cans of beer are stubbies. A bachelorette party is a hen’s night.

Though sorely tempted by all those glamorously essential knick knacks at Paddy’s, I ended up just buying a dress. A dress that apparently looks like a bandana. Maybe this makes me a cowboy. Maybe Eric’s description of my returning to the US with a tan and a hat will come true after all.

After the markets, we ventured to Chinatown, where conversation and eating of coconut danishes ensued. We sat across from one of those Hello Kitty stores where it looks like a flamingo threw up because everything is pink. While we talked about ink wells and The Patriot, a nearby pigeon massacred a dumpling he had found.

It then began raining torrents of heavenly emotional breakdown. Lots … and lots … of rain. With plans for an evening hike severed, we decided to choose a random ferry to ride. The boat to Kissing Point looked promising, so we hopped on. Daniel tried a few lines on Rachel and I about the nature of a place such as “Kissing Point.” In Rachel’s words, the fact that this group of people doesn’t mind being “ridiculous” with each other is a good thing. Kissing Point ended up being this little rocky beach. An old woman smoking a hookah pipe served as the greeting, with a lone fisherman tucked in somewhere behind her on the quiet dock. We spent a bit of time just soaking up the union of rain and sky while meandering through the layers of crushed seashells, before getting back on the return ferry. It was the kind of place that is just simple enough to make you overwhelmed with its brilliance. Especially with the rocks and shore besieged by the rain.  

Later, I was told by some Aussies not to go there after dark.

Our evening concluded with dinner at a pub downtown. I had a chicken wrap with avocado, while Rach and Tess, who seldom get meat at their borderline vegetarian homestay, indulged in lasagna. I don’t remember what Daniel got because none of this is important anyways.

Randomness from throughout the day .... 

Finish Never

I have recently been missing a lot of things that will probably never come back to me. Missing sights and smells and sounds that fade insistently as new ones cloud my mind. Beautiful clouds; but clouds nonetheless. Attempting to describe a welcoming loaf of banana bread made fresh from the excess bunches in the backyard becomes more difficult when you’ve been eating cafeteria food for three years. Recalling how a passion fruit vine smells when the indigo flowers are just about to give way to their new sleepy fruit is a challenge when genetically engineered apples and oranges are the only fruits you see on a regular basis. I was recently overcome by a desire to lay flat as a skipping stone on a tile floor in the heat of a summer afternoon; to be immune to the world in sweet stillness while thinking of nothing at all.

I guess it all breaks my heart just a little. Which sounds cheesy. But I enjoy cheese, as do church mice.

The church is an interesting phenomenon. I am becoming a firm believer in Christians, on a regular basis, experiencing how Christians of other denominations worship, though also maintaining community within their own congregation. As I visit more churches, though, it truly allows me to step back and notice the binding agents in the family of Christ. In going to a Uniting Church here in Sydney, I have been transported back to my days in Yellowstone as the people pray prayers of Confession, or stand for a Call to Worship; acts of faith from people serving a God Who is far greater than even our words, but Who is alive and present in our words. Last night I went to Hillsong Church. You may have heard of it. : ) In being in the middle of hands raised high as they go, and lights scattering color across faces concentrated on adoration, I was transported back to a similar church visited on the East Coast of the U.S., where I stood beside my dad as I saw him raise his hands for the first time in a service, unguarded, since the last time we were in Rio together; a church where the technical perfection of a service is just as much praise to our God as humble half-tuned pianos and fading microphones might be. Uninhibited worship. Worship standing in the presence of a Saviour who swallows our stupidity and allows us to just …. Be.  

How I have missed being.

Because of many excursions and observations, the significance of the Eucharist has also grown in my life, based on simple experiences of it being practiced in different manners at different places. This last Sunday morning I went to a church that is very, very small and close-knit. Communion was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long time, and the sheer simplicity of it nearly made me cry. Because of the small amount of people, a few at a time came up and sat in the front pew. The pastor, along with two others, proceeded to hand each person an element, along with saying a few words to each. There was no hurry. There was no production or sense of accomplishment. Just … communion. The bread was a huge loaf with the toughest of exteriors and the softest of interiors, broken in half as the pastor initially read the NT passage on the Last Supper. As it was handed out to each person, the woman giving it tore thick, unrestricted segments from the soft inside; a very powerful visual for the Body broken and given.

This contrasts with a Catholic church attended several weeks back, where the Eucharist is obviously taken only by those who are members. Some friends of mine, in their experience at it, accidentally found themselves in the line to go up and take the elements, having not been aware of the restrictions. When arriving in the front of the line, and being recognized by the priest as not belonging, they were escorted back to their seats and asked to sit down.

There was certainly a level of magnificence, though, in observing characteristics of the belief in transubstantiation at that Catholic service. The priest solemnly consumed all that was left after the congregation had partaken, being diligent in leaving no trace. As the music drew to a close, he silently began  mixing pure water into the chalice and drinking the wash, then gathering crumbs from the plate and ingesting those, as well. Then, in a long-practiced manner of ceremony and service, wiped everything clean with a persistent white cloth.

Chambers once said, “Many of us are loyal to our notions of Jesus Christ, but how many of us are loyal to Him?”

Later he said, “Begin to know Him now, and finish never.”