I finished Voyage of the Dawn Treader last week and ever since then, walking around in the Wilmington sun, it's all I can think about. It was such a good book and there were so many moments reading when I had to put the book down for reeling. One moment in particular was when the character Eustace becomes a boy again. He'd been turned into a dragon and as he takes off his skin again and again, slides out of each layer it's never quite enough. Aslan tells him he'll have to do it for him and so he does and it hurts but afterward he washes himself and all of the dragon is gone but all that dragon made him into is still there. I think about how true this is for life, of the part in Blue Like Jazz when Don Miller talks about dying to oneself again and again every day, peeling back our skin but not being able to step out of it on our own. Then suddenly you're a boy again, but more fully boy then you've ever been before and less of a dragon than you were even before you turned into one.
But it's the bright sun that keeps bringing back to this book. The characters are on a ship sailing for the very edge of the world, as far east as they can go. And the closer they get to the end, the bigger the sun gets, the brighter it is. Their eyes grow stronger so that eventually they're able to look right into the sun and into all the light all around them--it uses specifically the word strong several times. They become stronger, more able to withstand and take in all the light.
As I was walking home from campus the other day it was so bright I could barely open my eyes at all and ended up going most of the way with my head bent down like walking into wind. My eyes have always been more sensitive to light (either that or I'm just so used to squinting that they don't know what to do all the way open), and I thought about how when I step outside the word you might use is adjust. My eyes adjust to the light.
I don't know if C. S. Lewis meant to differentiate between growing stronger, being better able to bear things and adjusting, but I keep thinking about it. How those of us who grew up through hard stuff and are functioning adults will laugh sometimes and say that we're just well-adjusted. But there's such a huge difference in that choice of words. My eyes have adjusted to the sun, so I am able to bear its brightness better--in this sense you could argue there's little difference between becoming stronger and better adjusted. But the sun doesn't stay as it is as they sail farther east. It becomes bigger and brighter and everything is shining, but still they can bear it.
So you have a pair of eyes adjusting the brightness of the sun and as long as that sun doesn't get any brighter, you can take more of it as it is, little by little. But if your eyes grow in strength even while the sun grows in brightness--well, this is so much bigger. "They could look straight up at the sun without blinking. They could see more light than they had ever seen before... And next morning, when the sun rose, now five or six times its old size, they stared hard into it and could see the very feathers of the birds that came flying from it."
When I think about growing through the things we live through, I want so much for it to be like this. I don't want it to be adjusting to a fixed thing, but rather becoming more able, becoming better beholders as the things around us grow more as well, as there becomes more to behold.
"They could see more light than they had ever seen before." I think it's something like this. I think it's meant to be so much like this.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
the british are coming! the british are coming!
Right now as I type this I hear explosions coming from south of here. It sounds like our 4th of July fireworks display or like downtown is being bombed. I've looked online and there's nothing about fireworks and it sounds like the big kind, not the small whizzing ones you buy south of the border, and whatever it is has been going on for about fifteen minutes now. I feel like I should call people something like Paul Revere. Maybe not.
It's been crazy in this city today. I walked to campus around noon and at first it was nice. Except for walking to meetings and work, generally everything I've been doing with support raising has been inside so I'm afraid I haven't seen much sunlight lately. But there was a heat advisory today that I didn't know about and I sat one of my favorite benches on campus and forty minutes later, I felt wrung out. The truth is that I love the heat here. I love the humidity, how it's so thick sometimes, on days like today, and your lungs feel like sponges. It's also true we're using our air conditioning this summer, but I do love being out in it, the way the air suddenly becomes this thing you have to push through, the way pushing through curtains feels. This heat isn't the dry kind, either, the kind that feels like it might catch fire at any second and your skin burns just being out in it. You might feel like you're burning here, but it's a wetter, heavier hot. Think jungles, think submersion. It's oppressive sometimes, too much. But it's also like arms around you, being bundled in. Today the heat index was 107F. That's a little more than 41C.
And on top of that, two of the main water lines in the city burst. The last two days our entire neighborhood was without water because of construction and today we heard that now we have to boil it to drink it. It's a strange feeling. I remember running out of water after hurricanes when we were kids. The power and water would be gone for at least a week after the big ones and though we'd fill the bathtub with water, though we'd go days and days without showers, I can remember it running out and sitting under the elephant ears at my neighbor's house. It never got sun there and so the soil underneath was dark and moist and cool and we'd sit there drinking in the coolness, guzzling warm Dr. Thunder, the whole day passing in a haze.
I joked with my boss over skype the other day that it was good practice for missions in some parts of the world, all this heat and no water. And now that booming a few miles away. Tomorrow I expect I'll wake up and it'll be another hot day but nothing out of the ordinary, just life carrying on as usual. But this isn't bad either--with heat like this, you have to be still and watch and listen.
It's been crazy in this city today. I walked to campus around noon and at first it was nice. Except for walking to meetings and work, generally everything I've been doing with support raising has been inside so I'm afraid I haven't seen much sunlight lately. But there was a heat advisory today that I didn't know about and I sat one of my favorite benches on campus and forty minutes later, I felt wrung out. The truth is that I love the heat here. I love the humidity, how it's so thick sometimes, on days like today, and your lungs feel like sponges. It's also true we're using our air conditioning this summer, but I do love being out in it, the way the air suddenly becomes this thing you have to push through, the way pushing through curtains feels. This heat isn't the dry kind, either, the kind that feels like it might catch fire at any second and your skin burns just being out in it. You might feel like you're burning here, but it's a wetter, heavier hot. Think jungles, think submersion. It's oppressive sometimes, too much. But it's also like arms around you, being bundled in. Today the heat index was 107F. That's a little more than 41C.
And on top of that, two of the main water lines in the city burst. The last two days our entire neighborhood was without water because of construction and today we heard that now we have to boil it to drink it. It's a strange feeling. I remember running out of water after hurricanes when we were kids. The power and water would be gone for at least a week after the big ones and though we'd fill the bathtub with water, though we'd go days and days without showers, I can remember it running out and sitting under the elephant ears at my neighbor's house. It never got sun there and so the soil underneath was dark and moist and cool and we'd sit there drinking in the coolness, guzzling warm Dr. Thunder, the whole day passing in a haze.
I joked with my boss over skype the other day that it was good practice for missions in some parts of the world, all this heat and no water. And now that booming a few miles away. Tomorrow I expect I'll wake up and it'll be another hot day but nothing out of the ordinary, just life carrying on as usual. But this isn't bad either--with heat like this, you have to be still and watch and listen.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
just a few thoughts about buses and accidents
Just a quick one to say I was reading earlier today about the bus accident in Fresno. In the first few days and weeks after the accident in Romania the only thought I really ever had was just that I couldn't believe it happened. It was a crazy story, and in that sense it felt like it might not have happened to us. I don't think about it all that often anymore except maybe if I'm in a car and we run off the road a little. Or like today, reading that article. And I realize what could have happened and how it makes no sense that it didn't.
When I was in Madison, there were people at the national office who'd heard about it that summer. The joke was that we flipped in a mini-bus down an embankment and then I decided to go back. But not one week after that, another mini-bus in Romania was hit by a train and it was way worse.
Now I've been in some crazy situations to do with transportation in other countries: in Colombia the tour bus we were in lost traction in the back tires over the side of a cliff where I think they were doing some kind of construction. I don't know how to describe it but you could feel a small, short drop and hear the tires spinning on what I imagine was loose gravel or dirt. It was night time and I was looking out at the lights in the valley way down below and I remember having a sort passing thought about if we did go over the edge, with the spotlight on the bus, it might look like a plane falling out of the sky. We didn't go over. The wheels caught and we kept driving and only a few old people seemed the least bit shaken up. And then later on the trip we were in a Chiva (like a small bus without doors or windows) that caught on fire while we were driving down the mountain. It turns out the brakes went out and then the whole back lit up and we had to pull off the road without brakes and jump from it (all of this in Spanish, mind you).
So I'm not afraid of riding a mini-bus again and I don't want to be the kind of person who says lots of bad things about transportation in other countries. It actually kind of bothers me when people do that. And honestly I really don't think about any of these all that often, even the one in Romania, but days like today when I read something like that article, it just all comes back. There's not even a way to describe it beyond that, just that suddenly it's back and there isn't any wondering if it really happened. Most of the time, if it were to come up, it feels like just another crazy story in a list of really crazy stories I have from my life. But it's real on days like today.
When I was in Madison, there were people at the national office who'd heard about it that summer. The joke was that we flipped in a mini-bus down an embankment and then I decided to go back. But not one week after that, another mini-bus in Romania was hit by a train and it was way worse.
Now I've been in some crazy situations to do with transportation in other countries: in Colombia the tour bus we were in lost traction in the back tires over the side of a cliff where I think they were doing some kind of construction. I don't know how to describe it but you could feel a small, short drop and hear the tires spinning on what I imagine was loose gravel or dirt. It was night time and I was looking out at the lights in the valley way down below and I remember having a sort passing thought about if we did go over the edge, with the spotlight on the bus, it might look like a plane falling out of the sky. We didn't go over. The wheels caught and we kept driving and only a few old people seemed the least bit shaken up. And then later on the trip we were in a Chiva (like a small bus without doors or windows) that caught on fire while we were driving down the mountain. It turns out the brakes went out and then the whole back lit up and we had to pull off the road without brakes and jump from it (all of this in Spanish, mind you).
So I'm not afraid of riding a mini-bus again and I don't want to be the kind of person who says lots of bad things about transportation in other countries. It actually kind of bothers me when people do that. And honestly I really don't think about any of these all that often, even the one in Romania, but days like today when I read something like that article, it just all comes back. There's not even a way to describe it beyond that, just that suddenly it's back and there isn't any wondering if it really happened. Most of the time, if it were to come up, it feels like just another crazy story in a list of really crazy stories I have from my life. But it's real on days like today.
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