Chance of Kingfishers

jet-lagging

2011-01-19T14:12:00.000-08:00

It's one in the morning, and I've given up on the struggle for sleep.
Outside, water thick-knees are making strange sharp little calls and running around on their long little legs, eating insects.

And I'm Here. Here being home in East Africa, after a year's absence.
Being immersed in the world--savoring having bare feet and wearing a sarong again, mesmerized by the thrumming of fans and the din of East African birds.

The power went out when I turned up two days ago, so I spent a hot afternoon lying out on the verandah on a Cambodian grass mat with ants crawling over me, staring foggily at a hibiscus tree with sunbirds and barbets zipping about, feeling... happy.

However, I'm well grateful that Iringa, where I will be in five days time, is higher and cooler, perfect for writing. The coast is a place where one's brain just wants to pack it in altogether, I find, and take to swimming every day and staring in awe at fish...

Thinking deep and meaningful thoughts like Whoa, fish.

That's all I've got this dark night. Over and out, world...

A Reflection Off Job

2011-01-07T10:04:00.000-08:00

The dead bee is dry and nearly weightless
one bundle of pollen still
fastened to its knee.
Its legs tucked in,
wings stiffly spread,
it did not mean to die
nor welcome its death.

It smells of decay,
but faintly,
and the ants eat a bit
of its wing, and then leave it be.

The ants live in front
of the altar in this Catholic
prayer hall. They have made
a small hole in the caulking
between the tiles and they
emerge and descend from
this hole in ones and twos.
Church ants, nourished,
no doubt, on holy days,
by communion wafers.
Will they say a prayer
for the bee while its taste
still lingers in their tiny
mouths, their clicking jaws?
Will they say a prayer for me?
The book of Job is
a troublesome book.

The Buddhists have their seima,
their sacred boundary markers,
sunken into the earth around each temple;
The Khmer draw boundaries between the
cultivated world of village and rice paddy
and the dangerous alluring forest, but in
Job, the Hebrew God treats the entire earth
as Her space, His creation—
its bases are sunk,
its cornerstone laid,
and the stars sing and
the heavenly beings shout for joy.

The sea is wrapped and barred and encased,
mighty and proud, but kept from the land.
Under the water, the waters that teemed before
anything rose from the earth—first the sea,
first the sky—and now we mortals kill first
the seas and the skies—we who walk on the
dry-land will go last, already the weakest among
us are going—the Khiansi spray toad is gone now,
thousands of others crowd the gates of deep darkness,
nearly gone, and we, we who have not seen the springs
of the sea, the recesses of the deep, we who do not know
the paths to the dwelling place of light and darkness, we
who cannot find where the east wind is scattered, we who
cannot guide forth the Bear in her proper season—
we have power, nonetheless, terrible power—
the power to destroy, the power to kill.

Retrospective 7: on the trip to Banteay Chma

2010-04-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

The authorities are getting ideas--
the woman who plants chilies
and the man who plant mung beans
have been told that they must stop
using the degraded field around
the U-shaped muddy moat that
encircles the jumble of stones and
precarious tower of the ancient
Khmer temple Ta Prohm.
Four giant serene faces gaze out upon
the landscape in the four cardinal directions--
the fourth face is splitting upwards from its chin,
gravity tugging at its supporting lintel.
The authorities are returning on the 5th of September,
to discuss these matters, these sliding stones.
The woman knows the type of wood that has been
used to shore up the four lintels and the bowing arches;
she gives me a handful of green chilies, bundled into a
pouch made from twisting her sarong. I put them into
the front of my shirt for the walk home under the blazing
sun in a humid sky threatening rain. Someone unknown
has been uprooting the shrubs that have taken root around
the dilapidated towers, burning the undergrowth. The smell
of hot ash rises as I slowly circle the tower to gaze upon all
four faces. On my way out I pass a structure
like a chicken shed
and see pieces of carvings, stacked haphazardly--
a lotus flower pillar,
three partial statues of meditating Buddhas--
the bases with the crossed
feet and the cradled hands
resting upon them remain, the heads and torsos
are gone. They were probably victims of the 1998 debacle
that allowed the Thai military to loot Banteay Chma,
the vast broken sister
of this small temple. These fragments
surely have great value,
but no one is guarding this precious rubble,
and I stand in the ashes
and reach out and lift one of the blocks--
a curving shoulder.
I look for its companions, but find nothing.
It is startling heavy, this
piece of ancient stone, and I feel like a looter,
toting around the Buddha's shoulder,
stroking the toes on one standing foot. Hewing off
these stones heads, these shoulders
would have required great strength
and heavy tools. These pieces of the twelfth century,
dismembered, stolen,
lie now in my insignificant hands.
The block scrapes against its fellows
when I lay it back down. It was the fighting that destroyed the temples,
a woman argues. The Khmer Rouge were at one temple, the resistance
was stationed over there. Originally she accused the Vietnamese,
but then the group of interested onlookers agreed that this fighting was fifteen years ago,
long after the Vietnamese had gone.
Time has become elided here, in these places
where years were marked by battle after battle.
We hid in trenches, she said. Airplanes
shelled them. They even cooked rice in the trenches.
Her grandfather was too afraid
to open his eyes.

Retrospective 6: the middle of August

2010-04-09T05:07:00.000-07:00

The toads are going wild tonight,
Heart and Nga have been unfairly labeled gangsters,
the air is blessedly cool and I am back in the village,
joyfully so.
Grandmother Muon is better
and lavishing love upon
the sole remaining ginger kitten,
to my grateful surprise.
A candle burns on my trunk,
Sombath and Pin laugh with their mother,
we will go to that great old temple Banteay Chma together,
and my heart is glad.
Today, my 100th bird in Cambodia--
those lovely lovely rufous treepies,
hopping about in their sleek suits
of colors--grey and peach and white and black--
crying out and flying with the tips of their wing feathers
extended like fingers, soaring over the top of the ploughed field.
And the chestnut bee-eaters stalked me, following me on and on,
and unseen birds raged in a tree.

Retrospective 5: Grumblings on Volume

2010-04-09T05:06:00.000-07:00

I am tired of the yelling
whenever anyone wants anyone else.
There is no thought of disturbing others--
my host father shouts at my host sister,
fast asleep in her small room,
to come and catch the pigeons.
It was half past ten.
They awakened me too,
demanding I come and hand over my torch
so we could catch and eat the pigeons.
It is not lost on me that I have been complaining
rather a lot about these broody pigeons,
but shouldn't sleep be somewhat sacred?
Whoever was up at half past five this morning
began noisily stacking wood,
my host brother Jane turns on tractors and leaves them to idle
at all hours--once it's light, it's daytime,
and when there's a task needs doing, it's my host sister they call for,
even in the dead of night.
I'm tired of it.
And I'm tired of loud music blaring from vast speaker systems,
first the flying horse evenings,
the carousel with terrible disco tracks,
then three nights of hideous wedding music, and today,
the day of penance at the temple,
monks chanting and megaphones squealing from four a.m. onwards,
at intervals.
I'm in essence tired of the VOLUME.
Why must everything be so loud?
Why must we all be forced to hear each other's events?
And how can earplugs,
which were Designed for ears,
be so absurdly uncomfortable?

Retrospective 4: in Kampot at the riverhouse with friends

2010-04-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

Ah, Lord,
here I am.
Slowly clumsily surfacing--
my head aching
and my limbs heavy
from that drugged afternoon sleep,
here in the still hot sun of four o'clock,
in the soft shurr of a broom sweeping,
listening to the wind in the dry palms,
watching shadows shift,
feeling the world's glory.

My obsession with newness,
my boredom, my desire to hunt,
to know, to number, to accumulate,
these things threaten
the pleasure of my birding--
I don't do well with sameness,
with ordinariness--Katie's book recommendation,
the spectacular ordinary life--
the very title makes me nervous.
But surely it isn't all bad,
wanting to know,
to see as deeply as possible
the world around me--
what is the red winged hawk
that hunts over the Frenchman's spring?
What is the red capped brown ball of feathers
that vanishes into the reeds of our farm's pond
whenever I steal up close?

My thanks for a morning--
for flooded fields of water still as glass,
for tiny fish swimming over the hoof prints of cows,
for small bays cut into the thick stiletto palms
crowding the river's edge, covered with crab tracks,
for the yellow flowers with red hearts
that float along the meniscus of the brackish riverworld,
for grave mounds covered with thin strips of white cloth,
for rollers high and bright and fearless in the trees,
for wind in the papery sighing of the sugar palms,
for small bridges and boats that pass beneath them,
for all the many knit muscles of our arms,
that we can push an oar through the water, and row along--
for the possible treepie, and the innumerable brown bulbuls,
swooping from one bush to the next,
for a mighty fig tree towering above the forest,
for generous friends with quiet hearts--
and for last night's walk in the moonlight
along a river under the moon,
watching mountains against a starry sky--
for all these things,
my thanks, my praise,
my devotion.

Retrospective 3: Silence in Mondulkiri

2010-04-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

And all I want are the green hills and the feathered things,
the quiet of this morning's tramp--
not a human soul but myself for three blessed hours.
Just the alarmed birds,
and judging by the packs of small boys with slingshots
glimpsed on my way home,
good reason for that fear.

Solitude from people
and the presence of the creatures,
mute, instinctual, wild--
more resonant--
sounding,
ringing like bells,
tolling the energy and passion and creativity of God,
bringing us back
to a better understanding
of our place in the order of things--
loved, yes, cherished,
but merely motes in the vast rushing universe
borne aloft by God's undying love.

They praise better than we do--
they praise simply by being.
They return my awareness to being a creature,
a creature of God, that lives and must die.

Henri Nouwen wrote:
Silence is the way to make solitude a reality.

Yet in the heat and the noise
and the unrelenting presence of others
in the Cambodian village--
how can I pray?
I who become alive
when alone and away
from the hum of human activity.
Teach me to pray, Jesu,
in the midst of the world.

Retrospective 2: blazing heat

2010-04-09T05:02:00.000-07:00

God,
I cannot stand the noise--
the horrible music with the bass throbbing
the clashing of another music from across the street
the rumbling of diesel generators
the cries and yells of the dubbed Chinese films
the frantic barking of dogs
the hoarse crowing of roosters
the screeching claws and incessant cooing of the doves above my bed,
the popping of the fire of the burning corncobs,
blazingly hot and terrifyingly close to the house,
a single bucket of water propped beside them,
the wooden boards of the wall hot to the touch,
the sparks roiling and rising.

Are you enjoying living in the wilderness?
the commune authority said to me today--
it's fully forested, this place.

Relatively speaking.
But the burned logs roll out in wagons every day,
smoldering in the charcoal pits,
ending up as charred black lumps for sale
in old rice bags on the side of the road.
The poor feed off the forest.

Retrospectives

2010-04-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

It was a long year, my year spent largely in the village, and I spent less time writing in a journal than I have ever done. I took fieldnotes--jottings on my world and its events and people for my thesis, but I filled only one thin journal with thoughts on my own soul, my own self. I was lost to myself in some ways, which is perhaps necessary for being turned inside out, for trying to understand other lives. Yet I knew myself blessed by God--every door I needed to live in northwest Cambodia swung wide open and all I had to do was gather my courage and walk through them. And walk and walk, for it was a year, an entire year, of my one short sweet life. I am looking through this past year's slim journal tonight, and I have decided to post some excerpts in the coming days in this long neglected forum, in honor of that year now gone forever.

it's bad when you forget to cite someone, but I did,
and here were their ringing words, given to us
to reflect upon at a February retreat:

Whoever is on a journey towards God
goes from one beginning to another beginning.
Will you be among those who dare
to tell themselves: Begin again!
Leave discouragement behind!
Let your soul live!

village

2010-04-07T03:04:00.000-07:00

I just called my village family. In the village where I left them at the end of January.
I'm still spinning from it.
I begged them to summon my grandmother
from her little house,
who says water comes from her eyes when she thinks about me,
and asked when I'm coming back again.
I said in two years
and forbade her to get Heavily Ill.
My host mother and I discussed
the many layers of clothes I'm wearing,
the phone card I had to buy to ring them,
the dry hot season they're having,
and the fact that my sisters
had dreamed of me the night before,
which was clearly now
an omen that I would be in touch.
My brother Jane and I discussed
his fever
and the young papaya trees now growing
on his farm.
My niece Srei Leakh
informed me about her birthday
and the gifts she was given,
and asked about a hundred times
if I missed her.
The village chief, my adopted father,
said he's tired of working for no money
as the village chief,
but the authorities won't let him resign,
and asked when my wedding was scheduled...

Which brings us to my Lie.
I felt bad about this Lie all year.
It was an attempt to go into the village
as a respectable and comprehensible unmarried woman.
I said I had left a fiancee back in Scotland,
who I'd marry after I finished my schooling.
And then by the time I started feeling really guilty
about this whole lie,
it had already been passed all the way up
to the DISTRICT GOVERNOR,
and it was too late.
I figured that if the entire district
found out I'd been telling stories,
they would assume that nothing
about me was as it seemed.
So now I had to kill this Lie,
this albatross of falsehood.
This involved More Lying.
Shameful.
I said that our hearts
were no longer in agreement
because I had been away too long,
and the wedding was off.
So. Lies upon lies.

One of the gentlemen farmers,
this rich man who has a farm
and a job in the capital
and comes up occasionally
to faff about and get very drunk
with the village chief,
had informed my host family
that I had severed my heart
from them all
as evidenced by my not calling.
I felt quite annoyed by this.
But now they can tell him
he's wrong.
They dreamed of me,
and I called
from a cold land,
to a hot place
waiting for the rain,
and about to welcome in
their new year.

confession

2010-04-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.
I'm no longer a bad birder.
One thing led to another...
and I got in over my head and started hanging about
charming and esoteric people who could say,
O, western marsh harrier, that's a first for southeast Cambodia
when a large brown hawk-thing dashed by...
and I let my deep and pressing need for knowledge to get involved...
and I've become a half decent birder.

Hallum has informed me that I must resign my post as the head of the Bad Birder of Cambodia (and Friends). I said that surely as the founder of the whole glamorous endeavor, I couldn't be made redundant. He said that I was now actually a Birdwatcher, and would actually get up early in the morning for the cause. I admitted that this was true. He said I can remain a sort of spiritual director of the thing, but he is taking up the reins. I said that he needed to start using his binoculars if he wanted to watch birds. He said that this sort of talk is the reason I've been summarily promoted out of my own society...

I still don't take photographs of birds. My apologies to those dear (and sometimes annoying, yes, Eli, Ornithological Brother-Friend, I mean you) friends who keep asking why I don't. I really think that one either watches birds or photographs birds, and I would rather watch them. Someday, if I ever have a good camera again, I will reconsider this state of affairs.

I am, however, going to learn to draw birds. I've become disgraced by my own field notes, which occasionally have a badly scrawled cartoon-like head of a bird that doesn't help me in the slightest when I identify it later. And I need things to do to keep me sane this year, and I can't just up and go the far reaches of Scotland in pursuit of birds anytime I leave the office. So. Birds. On paper. Drawn with pencils. And maybe some Markers.

I bought a book about it. The main problem with the very gorgeous book that I bought is that the guy thinks we should all be drawing birds in the field. As in on the wing, on the wire, in the pond. This takes me back to the far reaches issue. And it makes me think that I should maybe then just get on with the photography... This whole birding thing just keeps getting more complicated. I have good binoculars now, and now I feel my life would be infinitely better if I had a Harness to wear them on. I have finally started using a birding notebook, and now I'm supposed to be dragging art supplies out to the lagoons? Honestly. I'll be living in a caravan soon, surrounded by archaic tomes on birds of the world.

All of this to say that the BBC (and friends) might need rechristening. Suggestions welcome.

stripping the church

2010-04-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

We had our last supper this evening,
and then we stripped the church,
together, in silence.

We yanked down these lovely sailing ships
the children made out of cut-apart plastic bottles--
their pennants sailed gaily above our heads all this Lent
while we thought of the food we eat
and the waste we make.

We took away the altar cloth, which was brown,
with small white squares covered with the thumbprints of
our congregation.
It was all bundled up and dragged off.

We took away all the stones
and the clay candle-holders
and the fishing net strung full of empty bottles and cans.
We carried out the cross.
It was all stuffed in the back room.
It felt like a kind of violence,
like we were killing things.
And I realized that each time
we deal in death
or act in cruelty
or turn from mercy
we abandon him.

Our vicar read that
the disciples abandoned him
in Gesthemane,
in the garden,
with the mob that had come
to take him away,
and I wanted to say, no,
no, let's stay this time,
let's stay with each other,
let's keep watch with him,
let's stay awake,
let's hold his hand
through the long dark night to follow.
But they didn't,
and nor do we.

Little Xanthy got confused when asked to blow out
the tea candles that represented the disciples,
and also blew out the big candle that represented Jesus.
Her brother Sebastian whispered loudly,
He's dead.
And Xanthy looked alarmed,
as if she had killed him,
and I thought, no, my sweet,
it wasn't you,
we did it.
We all did.
We blew out the light
and we walked away.

A new Celtic blessing

2008-11-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

Winter has come to us in my current place
on our curved world,
and all is cloaked with snow,
changing all the surfaces of things.
I fear it, but I am also in awe
of its rampant beauty.

Weather is a blessing
in the midst of transient times.
It is impossible not to take weather seriously,
to avoid being pushed into awareness of the present moment,
whether that moment be drenched in sweat,
soaked in rain,
or chilled and frosty.

Weather brings me back from my daydreams,
my wanderings between what I have left behind and what is to come,
and leaves me in this very instant, shocked by the coldness of the air
in my lungs, the tingling of my hands, clad in my grandmother's scarlet
gloves...

Weather reminds me that I am here, now. For now.
For another six weeks, and then I will
be in a dizzingly different climate.
But the weather holds
me in the present moment,
nearing the end of this task,
yet with my hands still so very full.

And with this thought of weather on my mind,
I was struck again by Celtic prayer, by
its rootedness to our geography...
Here is a prayer by J. Philip Newell,
a spiritual writer whose work I highly recommend.

The blessings of heaven,
the blessings of earth,
the blessings of sea and of sky.
On those we love this day and
on every human family
the gifts of heaven,
the gifts of earth,
the gifts of sea and of sky.

May they come to you.

bright spots and tumbling headlong

2008-09-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

My teaching is coming along.
My father advised me to simply find the 'bright spots in the room' and teach to that small crowd, and let all the rest come along as best they can or wish to.
But I'm new at this and an idealist still, and I have to confess I want them all.
I want them all to be bright spots--illuminated, interested, engaged.
A room ablaze with light, as it were.
And that's a tall order.

The material for my afternoon class tomorrow is abstract and difficult, and I am seeking a way to bring them into it--closer to the frame... Like in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that portion near the beginning of the book where the children are staring at a picture of the oceans of Narnia, and it is such a Real picture that they stare harder and harder, and the picture begins to move, and then the children are swept into the picture itself.

That is the goal--how to make theoretical discussions of globalization so real that they start to swirl and flow, and we all tumble in headlong.

Such a consuming thing, to teach.

in search of self

2008-09-12T10:18:00.000-07:00

The moon was luminescent last night,
a gleaming broken china plate,
and a wind was stirring
as my father showed me the grounds--
all the plants that must be uprooted or sheared
before winter comes.

This morning, before first light,
they were gone. And I awoke
to stillness. The television has
been disconnected, and I sat
at the table with coffee in my
hands, observing the trees post
their solemn watch around the
pond, and listened.

Things rise in silence.

This house is large for a hermit's cell,
it allows for restless pacing, or escape
from one's self, room by room, and is
full of artefacts of our lives. And I am
no hermit, nor monk--I am not
withdrawing from the world in order
to pray from the world, as Merton
once described the Trappists. Instead,
it is refuge, it is where I can come home
safe to myself. Home from the dizzying
effort of sharing this small store of wisdom
and experience that I have, trying to be
lucid, to be clear, to be reflective, to open
doors rather than hurling them shut.

I feel as transparent and as public in
little Houghton as I have felt anywhere--
it's like being on stage in some medieval
morality play--with the same cast of
archetypal characters. The students, we
are told, time and again, watch us. We
are watched. Will the audience think
me Judas if I never attend chapel?
Will the audience consider me a Pharisee,
a Roman, or Nicodemus, seeking truth
quietly in the night?

And I who am used to having
many selves,
(shuffled like cards for the hand that must be played)
many worlds,
wonder--
can I be true to one?

Sea Voyage

2008-09-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

It's been over a month now
in this place of berries and bears,
of shy wood ducks and tall rows of corn,
this North America I left more than ten
years ago, never intending to return for
more than visits.

The students are here now,
over one hundred of them
in my hands, and the
responsibility weighs
upon me. There are so many
ways to mean well yet go wrong.

I suppose that's true in all things in life.
But I feel, as always, unprepared for
this next journey in the long sea
voyage of my life.

As always, I lack a compass, or good maps,
I sail with the stars, and many are the mistakes
made in my attempts at celestial navigation. I go
east, to the beginning of the world and the end of
all things, and I do not doubt that I shall be welcomed
home, at the end of my portion of days.

But some days I tire of the sea,
of always leaving the dry land behind,
of the terror of thunder and gale and storm,
of the threat of smugglers' lanterns,
and all the long uncertainties of the journey.

Some days I think this is a fool's errand,
this life lived in faulty service of a Lord
I scarcely understand.

But there are companions for the journey,
most days, and strange wonders, like
dolphins and phosphorescence in these
mysterious waters.

And though the water onboard is brackish,
and the water without all salt,
I have heard tell, that at the edge of the world,
where I sail with all the hope and courage I can
muster up, the water is sweet.

Pentecost at Saint James

2008-05-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Breath came into them
and they lived.

This phrase from Ezekiel 37 was written in many languages, set unobtrusively on the shelves in front of unadorned glorious sunlight yellow walls.

Over our heads, tissue ribbons of fire descend from the wires that stretch across our encircled chairs—red, gold, coral, bronze, lemon yellow.

In the front of the room, where we kneel to take communion, glowing crimson swathes of cloth descend from the ceiling to two white pedestals, pillars of fire.

Our skepticism about the good we seek to do
must not erode our compassion,
Geoffrey says, retired mime.

He enacts Ezekiel 37, first a frenzied urbanite, a puppet of meaningless frantic repetitive motion, then dead, then slowly returning to life, blown back into self awareness.

In the song, poet Kathy Galloway renders the Spirit female—
She comes with sister’s carefulness
strong to support and bind.
Her voice will speak for justice’ sake
and peace is in her mind.

She comes with power like the night
and glory like the day.
Her reign is in the heart of things—
O come to us and stay.

We daringly attempt an unrehearsed responsive reading of the scriptural Pentecost account,
with drums and shakers,
and a great babbling in many tongues.

I half expect the roof to fly off
and a white dove descend.

If I were a hawfinch, where would I be?

2008-04-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Sunday was a momentous day for me. I finally screwed up my courage, unlocked my bicycle from the bike stand in George Square, near my office, and rode it up and down the hills of the city to my home near the sea. I have a bus phobia, as in, I fear being flattened by a doubledecker bus while careening along on my bicycle. Thus I'm so not into the riding on the main roads.

I read this lines and find this simply ridiculous. I was a motorbike riding fiend in Cambodia, and I can't ride a bicycle in Edinburgh. WHY? WHY? In my defense, my phobia is rooted in an actual near death-by-bus experience from when I was 10 and had insisted on my ability to ride a bicycle to school in Oxford... And they just swoop by you, missing you by inches, and... Agh. Can't do it.

Okay, so I got halfway home, buffeted by wind and breathless, and then the domes of the glasshouses of the Botanic Gardens rose up out of the city. I dismounted the bicycle, which had a Very flat tire by now, locked it up, rooted around in my bag for my binoculars--which British birders call Bins. Have you got your bins? Lovely.... And went in search of a hawfinch.

There's one in the photo below, from a few posts back. But I have yet to see one in the winged flesh. They are hard to see. They hang out quietly way up in the canopy of trees, munching on fruits like cherry which they crack with their fierce beaks. And I had heard, somewhere, that the Botanics in April were the best place in Edinburgh to see a hawfinch. Ergo the bins in the handbag.

Well. Well, the Botanics are strangely full of trees. All kinds. All heights. And shrubs, in fact. Flowers and bushes and even thickets. I got in amongst the wandering crowds--loads of children in prams, loads... And while everyone else eyed the lovely shrubbery, I wandered around like a lost child trying to see some birds.

There was, however, not a bird to be seen except for the occasional gull and crow. There was the sound of birds. I was surrounded by birdsong, more calls and whistles and shrieks and rattles than you can imagine. But not even a glimpse of the singers. After about thirty minutes I realized what an extraordinary thing it is to be simply focused on sound. The paper like curls of a tree's bark filled the world when I wandered one way, the rustle of bamboo when I wandered another. And the birds, louder and louder. I wandered in a daze, looking up into the canopy, aloft on a sea of sound, lost in the tops of the trees shaking against the dome of the atmosphere.

Finally, I wandered out into something more like a traditional English park. And then, in that odd way birds have of upsetting one's expectations entirely, there were birds everywhere. Blue tits, great tits, chaffinches, magpies, sparrows, dunnocks. All ordinary common birds to a birder, singing their hearts out, pulling me into another world entirely. And then, when I had given up on seeing new birds entirely and was just happily engaged in sorting out which bird makes which kind of noise--a small brown bird fluttered by, and landed on the trunk of a nearby tree. I looked idly in its direction and realized that I had never before seen such a bird.

This is, by the way, one of the reasons I bird. How often does one spot a new mammal? But in the avian world, entirely new creatures are there for the seeing, day after day, region after region....

It was a lovely bird. It sat, perfectly still, as people strolled within arm's length of it. It was shaped like a teardrop, with a forked brown tail. Its belly and chin were white, its beak was hooked, its feet were pink and had a long long hindclaw. Its back was brown, but it redefined brown. Through my binoculars its feathers were an intricate mosaic of brown and black triangles and chevrons. Its eyes were bright black peppercorns. And finally, it moved. It tilted its head from side to side, then hopped, laterally, to another portion of trunk, and began to creep upwards, gently probing the edges of the bark for insects.

It was, in fact, a treecreeper. A beautiful brown bird that creeps up trees. It was perfect.

I did not see what I set out to see. But something found me. Praise be.

Mine own romantic town

2008-04-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

They're not my words. They belong to Sir Walter Scott, and they are about the castle in Edinburgh. Yesterday was Historic Scotland's public day, which means that the castle was free to the public. So I went, for the first time, up into the place I have gazed upon so fondly and so long.

It was fabulous. But I prefer Sir Scott's words to my own, and so here is his stanza:

Such dusky grandeur clothed the height
Where the huge castle holds its state
And all the steep slope down
Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky
Piled deep and massy, close and high
Mine own romantic town.

an odd dreaming of birds and snakes

2008-04-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve started dreaming about birds. They are always
different in my dreams than they are in life— larger, stranger.
One night it was a scarlet avocet,
black as night, with crimson Chinese characters
inked upon its back. One night it was hawfinches,
larger than hawks, their beaks thick as rods of steel
and their heads dimpled like the top of an apple.
Sometimes they are indistinguishable but large as elephants,
in pine forests that tower against the sky.

Maybe these landscapes are so large because
my life feels small just now, constrained,
my life lived within offices and in chairs in front
of monitors, with only my mind active, and yet
even that chained to the form of academic writing.
Natalie Goldberg once urged writers to think of
structure as a necessary skeleton, or like the skin
of a snake, that could be stuffed full with whatever
you liked, but had to be recognizable as a snake.
I haven’t done very well accepting that I need to
build a snake right now and have been wrestling
around with the form, frustrated. Perhaps it is a
useful metaphor to embrace. Perhaps I need to see
this week as making its spine, one weird vertebrae
at a time, laying them into their lovely interlocking
pattern. Maybe the birds are my desire to escape,
but it is a blessing to be on this journey towards
a PhD at all. Perhaps I had best be on my guard,
to guard this feeble little serpent of a project from
the fey eye of the eagle circling in the currents far
above.

A Late Reflection on the Death of Jesus

2008-04-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

This reflection by Marty Wroe was good to sit with and meditate with on Good Friday, and I wanted to share it, even now, Easter long past.

After Jesus drank the wine, he said,
Everything is done! He bowed his head
and died. John 19.30

That’s all, folks!
Show’s over.

Let’s go home, nothing left to see,
Jesus has left the building.

Has left us all.
Has gone.

Who’d have thought it would come to this?

History colliding with mystery.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word
is now sentenced.
Full stop.
Close quotes.
New paragraph.

Whatever ‘everything’ is…
‘Everything’ is now complete.

Things seen, things unseen.
And things in between.

Everything that was started has finished.
Every beginning has found its loose end,
all thoughts been taken to their logical conclusion.
And any others.
At this moment, on this day,
we have seen it all.
A God bows his head respectfully
and dies.

Everything dies.
Life dies.
Death dies.

Everything is done.
Except love.

Only love is not done.
Only love will not die.
Everything is finished except love.

Love bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.

At some point everything will be done.
Except love.

Love is never done.

juxtapositions

2008-04-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of a place that will probably closely resemble the village where I'm bound come July and then in January 2009 for a year--though I'm hoping for a little more vegetation, perhaps foolishly... Here are the website photos of my church--Saint James--and our Easter prettiness. I made those butterflies; the children made them more beautiful. I am an Origami Queen.
And here is my friend Ruth's photo of our fair city in the snow--it's Dickensian, and also o so atmospheric.
I leave now in three months and my heart and mind tracks between these alternating landscapes--landmined village, wintery city, church community... Juxtapositions, it is.

bird joke, aka Lisa tries to display her jolly side

2008-04-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

Which bird is always out of breath?

A puffin’

good moment bad moment

2008-03-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

Dears,
This is how my vicar always addresses his emails to us: Dears. I like it. I'm adopting it.

I have had terribly good intentions these past few weeks, wanting to write about Easter at my church and the week I spent in New York with my mum and my brother, mourning my grandmother. But I haven't managed a word.

So I begin now, without finesse, at six in the evening on a Monday night, hours away from laying down the work of the day. When I was back in the US of A for a week, there were some good moments and some bad moments.

Here are some good moments--above all the snow that lays down and stays down for the cold winter months in western New York, the birds are visible--
visible on the ground,
on the cold waters,
in the leafless trees.

More birds than you could ever wish for and some in shocking colors--
the crimson flash of a cardinal
the cornflower blue of the mocking jays--
and Canada geese strewn across the landscape--
scattered amongst the corn stubble poking through the snow, pecking for scraps,
flying overhead, gathered in conference on the shores of the rivers...

Here is a bad moment. My grandmother died a week before we could make our way back to her side, so when we arrived she had already been buried, in a blue dress the color of the sky.
She was just gone.
There was no body,
no coffin,
no gravestone even,
as my mother thought it was probably yet to be carved
and did not want to go to the cemetary until it was ready.
Just her absence, with us as we planned her memorial service.
Although to be fair, it was mainly my mother who planned it, just as it has been mainly my mother who has carried my grandmother through these last years of her very long life.

We created a montage of photos from every era of my grandmother's life,
and my mother wanted to blow up a few photos
to put at the front of the church for the memorial service.
So we drove to Walmart, this being the only remotely nearby place
that could scan and blow up photographs on the spot.

We went into the Walmart, perhaps you have as well--
bright soulless fluorescent lights, tinny electronic music
of once loved songs, aisles piled high with things
at cut-rate prices--we were beguiled by the travel size aisle--
I forsook my No Walmart Purchasing principles for the
sunscreen tube that fit perfectly in the palm of my hand...
And then we found our way to the photo processing center,
an island in the middle of the large store.
The machines faced you to do your own scanning and ordering,
then women inside the island brought you your orders. Ostensibly.

We scanned the photos of my grandmother, one of her quite recent, grinning madly, her hair as white as snow, the other quite old, at least twenty years old, when her hair was still dark brown. Then we waited,
and then the woman came over to us,
bearing the photos in her hands,
and said we couldn't have one of them.
Because we'd scanned a photograph done by a professional company--she had seen the signature on the corner--and it was against the law.
This moment, under those soul-stripping white lights in an island in the middle of a store I hate,
was the bad moment.
Because not only was this woman saying we couldn't have the photo we had made,
she was holding it in front of us,
flaunting it, this perfect photograph,
and in the absence of my actual grandmother,
this photograph suddenly became her, signified her,
and we could not have her, we were not permitted to touch her,
to take her away and care for her.
It's just that it's such a good photo, my mother said, nearly in tears.
I'm sorry, the not-sorry-at-all woman said, waving around my grandmother.
I could lose my job.
We want it for a funeral, my brother said.
It's against the law, the woman said.
Look, I said, not very nicely,
what if we just take it for a day and bring it back to you AFTER the funeral? How would THAT be?
I could be fined $10,000, the woman said.
She would not be shamed.
She stood with that beautiful photograph of my smiling grandmother
clutched in her hands
safely behind the scanner,
safely out of our dangerous reach.
There was nothing, save violence,
to be done, so we took my mother's hands
and said, Come away, come away,
and left the photograph, the icon,
my dear sweet grandmother,
just over the counter,
just beyond our grasp,
in the most terrible store in the world.

one Sunday while birding

2008-02-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

Nature was my church today. I am so tired I can hardly lift my arms. I carried a friend's laser printer over to the office and then went birding for four hours, which involves holding binoculars up around the level of one's face, as you doubtless all know... Hence the arm-weariness. I reached my one hundredth bird sighting today on my European list. There were three finches, linnets, pecking for worms on a lawn. I am excited about this.

But I went birding with a Real Birder a few weeks ago, and that made me realize a few things. I am too focused on seeing new things, for one thing--my only record of birding expeditions have been these lists where I record each new sighting. Mike was like, don't you take field notes? and I was like, huh? He has this wee notebook in which he writes down everything he sees, and notes where, and how many of them there were, and sometimes he sketches them. So you have this record of everything that was in a place, all mixed together. And--this was particularly mind boggling--he made me leave the Collins guide in the CAR. We'd refer to it later, he said, and wandered off. It turns out that you're not supposed to waste time birding referring to the bird book and staring fruitlessly between the page and the feathered creature. You're supposed to just look really hard and--of course--take field notes. You identify it later. In the moment, on the strand, in the dunes, in the thicket, you just look. You look so hard that you can remember it later. And you write it down.

That takes a particular kind of attention, a particular kind of gaze. I bought myself a field notes book today, in honor of Mike, and went out to the sea alone, and wandered around for four hours in ever changing weather, and watched birds, and took field notes. Here are some random and lovely sightings:

The high high sea was making all the sea birds reckless and crazy. Ten long-tailed ducks, Arctic ducks, were honking and flying about in a group of males, and then landing like bouncing water skiers then diving, then coming up and flying by again. They are white ducks with domed heads and chocolate and black and pink patches of color. Two long curling pintail feathers fan over their backs. Spectacular ducks.

A kestrel was struggling fiercely to stay in one precise hovering spot in a strong wind, waiting for the mice to show themselves below.

A sea gull flapping by suddenly shook its body like a dog coming out of a pool, a sudden silly shimmy.

The ponds were full of hundreds of waders and ducks. Oystercatchers huddled in a tight black and white mass with their red beaks poking out of the chiascuro. Teal scooped for food--the males have brown heads with green patches rimmed with yellow. The females are clad in a boring variegated brown but have a bright green speculum on the side of their wing. Four enormous shelducks, which are actually related to geese, towered above the smaller birds.

A flock of goldeneye on the river Esk were diving and diving, some of the males doing this display they do where they tilt their heads all the way back and then pump their necks up and down. It's ridiculous and delightful. The males' heads appear jet black, but in the light they shimmer jet green or metallic purple.

After a sudden squall, a full double rainbow spanned the sky, their ends planted in the waders' pond and in the restless sea.

That's it. Those are my sightings, and the sea itself was like the sea in my dreams, full and restless and steely grey. Things to dream upon, things to sustain me for the week ahead.

quiet

2008-02-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

My friend Erin left this morning for Namibia, after a long and loving goodbye party last night that started at a bar and ended up hours later at my house with whiskey (which I avoided) and pizza (which I didn't) and people in my kitchen and bedroom hanging out until I forced them all out onto the cold foggy streets of Edinburgh at midnight so I could go to bed and watch the room spin. Spinning rooms is the reason I rarely drink red wine anymore. Then our friend Nathan came over for breakfast and more farewells and there were suitcases to pick up and hem and haw over and eggs to be eaten and then the real farewell and then the inevitable sad little text messages from the woman with long hours moping in an airport in London on her hands, before the journey really begins, the journey you don't come back from, or you return from strangely changed, the attempt to enter and understand another world.

My friend Erin left this morning, and when I came home late this afternoon I walked into a house shrouded in silence, blanketed in quiet. Quiet like the tendrils of the fog, lying over everything. It's been so frantic, so much worry and concern and love these past few months--for before Erin there was Laura, who is in Africa now too--so many outings and talks and meals and quarrels.

The quiet is palpable. I can reach out my hand and touch it. I can feel my heart beating. I can hear the wind in the garden, roaring and ceasing, roaring and ceasing. The alarm clock is ticking like my grandfather's beautiful old clock that hung on the wall in Kijabe, with the iron hands, so loudly I want to bury it deep.

I have so much to do and yet I have stopped dead, paralyzed by all this stillness. By the cessation of life swirling around me, lives heard through the thin wall between the two bedrooms, tugging me along, and me tugging them too.
It's so quiet.

Sending the Beast Away

2008-02-19T07:27:00.000-08:00

The wild beast of procrastination,
of dread,
has me by the neck and is tugging at me,
trying to take me out of the white house with
the red windows into the woods,
where I will be scratched and bruised,
where I will be lost in the darkness between the trees.

The wild beast has hold of me,
hear her growl, throaty and low.
Her red tongue laps hot against my neck.
The wild beast has hold of me.
She has had me for days.
I am prey.

And where is the sword of determination,
the grappling hooks of will?
First there was a multitude of worries and wonderings,
then there was illness, and now, such news I have
received, such tidings! A new home offered, and new funds for
the learning, and perhaps even more happiness for the taking.

It is no wonder that I let her in the door,
that I opened to her soft knock,
that I am now held fast.

But I must break free.
I must brace myself against the door,
must struggle and cry out,
must sit down and write,
bidding the beast of fur and fang and dread and fear,
Be gone.
Be gone now.

Time now for sacrifice,
time now to be poured out like water upon stone,
time now to face the ever empty, ever awful page.
Time to stand free and send the beast away.

this thing we sing

2008-02-15T10:02:00.000-08:00

There's this song we sing at St. James, when children are baptized, and it's playing in my head this dark afternoon in Edinburgh. It goes like this:

God to enfold you,
Christ to uphold you,
Spirit to keep you in heaven's sight;
so may God grace you, heal and embrace you,
Lead you through darkness into the light.

That seems like a good prayer for the day.
We're meditating on freedom and its opposite, the things that hold us fast, that bind us, this Lenten season at my church. We decorated the church for it by wrapping the walls with cloth like parcels in India, then stringing and tying them up. My friend Erin and I made the front altar table into a cross between Lazarus' burial slab, covered with shrouds, and the mast on a sailing ship. Happily, everyone else liked it.

And last Sunday, in lieu of a homily, we all sat in silence and made these tiny books, in which we wrote the people, and the places, and the things in the world that we feel are bound and captive, for which we long for freedom, and then we encircled them with string in good Celtic fashion, and tucked them into the string-wrapped walls, where they surround us, as prayers, for the rest of Lent.

Everything I've written on here lately seems to be sad or angry, so never mind the contents of my little book. Let me say instead, Praise be for a community of people willing to hold sorrow in their hearts, willing to wrap walls with string and struggle with the staple gun, and make little books of prayers. This one guy was there on our art day who I didn't recognize. Turns out he doesn't go to church at all. He's friends with a couple in our church and his daughter heard about the art day and was insanely excited and he said he'd come with her, to see this place that his friends spoke of so often and so warmly. So this random lovely man held up reams of cloth and wrapped things in twine with perfect strangers and took his daughter home when she got too tired for words and stopped liking her companions, and it doesn't matter whether he ever comes back, it matters that he felt able to come. I am deeply and dearly grateful for my church.

This is a vampire bat head I made for my friend Nathan's birthday party, which is tonight, while feeling ill the last couple of days. It was supposed to be a crocodile, and there was this website with very clear instructions, and I didn't have a rectangular box but rather a square one, so I got crazy. The first one is a 'card' for him, since he's mad about the vampire bat head. Yeah, no kidding--I CLEARLY need some children.

remembering the ordinary people

2008-02-06T07:09:00.000-08:00

These are all pictures taken off the Associated Press. I chose them because they remind me of what most of Kenya is composed off--millions of ordinary people, trying to live. Lots of them small. I think they are good to see with, to think with, as we continue to remember the situation in Kenya and pray for peace and reconciliation. We redecorated my church for Lent on Sunday, and lots of the children were there. Some were helping paint. Some were playing with great enthusiasm and abandon around and occasionally right in the midst of what the rest of us were up to. Our theme for Lent is the freedom to be, acknowledging that which binds us and holds back from our freedom in Christ. This sort of conflicted with telling the children to stop messing about... For our art theme, we decorated the church with all kinds of rope and twine and cloth, like wrapped parcels. My friend Erin and I did the altar table at the front, which looks like a shroud on a slab, maybe the tomb of Lazarus, maybe Christ himself.
At any rate, on several occasions children came up to me and said why are we wrapping things up with string? what does it mean? and I tried to explain that some things tie us up or keep us from being free and they nodded wisely and ran away. And I assumed that it didn't mean that much to them, the idea of being constrained, or bound, or tied.
But it would mean a lot to children sitting in IDP camps, waiting to go home, or to go elsewhere, or for the next meal, hoping that nothing bad happens in the camp itself. Such camps are the epitome of constraint, of a lack of freedom.
Children have been staying home from school, and the leaders from both sides have asked them to go back. So here some of them go. Let us not forget for a moment, as Tagore once wrote. Let us remember in our dreams and in our waking hours.

Last words

2008-02-01T06:26:00.000-08:00

This was on a friend's facebook page from Kenya, the text of a letter that was printed in the letters to the editor in the Nation newspaper last week. It is a hard read, but I have decided to put it up here, to honor this man, whose identity is, as he says, irrelevant. His words, his life, his death, are not.

I write this letter as my final mortal action upon this earth.
I have determined to collect email addresses of the prominent people that I know and my friends and send it to them from an anonymous email address for two reasons. First, to spare them the distress of know before-hand what I am doing, therefore saving them from culpability, and second, because my identity is now and in future irrelevant - it could be any of those men around the country who feel like I do.

As you might guess from my style of writing, I am a well-educated man... I am a graduate of NAIROBI AND STRATHMORE UNIVERSITIES. I have been privileged to be educated around the world. I have worked in Berlin, Stockholm, London, New York and many other places. I speak six languages fluently.

Even with these achievements, I have no more reason to live. If you will want to look for me as you read this, go to City Mortuary where I have determined to fester among the anonymous people there. I will explain why in this letter, and like Pavlov, I shall retire.

This is my protest. Mr. Kibaki, I indict you.
You stole the election that I stood for six hours to participate in. By your actions, my life irrevocably changed. History will now forget the great achievement and legacy that you were poised to make and it shall remember that for your self righteousness, people lost lives, property, and most of all, hope.

On the blood of my people, I indict you. Mr. Odinga, my chosen president, on the blood and tears of my people, I indict you.

Because of your bitterness, justified though it is, my life irrevocably changes. My greatest achievements, my family, died in your name. My son, my heir, named after my great ancestors, went up in smoke before he could say my name, or his great name, Koitalet. My twin daughters, Wanjiru and Sanaipei, were found by my burnt house in Eldoret, having bled out of their wounds. My wife died with the seed of six men inside her, demented and finally catatonic.

This happened in your name, Sir. Because you have to get justice. Because my wife was from the wrong community. Because you must get what is yours. You will read this and feel nothing. You will rationalise it as accepted collateral damage. Some must die in the pursuit of justice, isn’t it?

Kenyans, on the blood of my children, I indict you all. You lost the ball. You forgot that our ethnicity is something we joke about, as we go about our business. You forgot that we do not fight, we mediate. You forgot that we are a great people, built on the back of great people. You forgot its just elections.

On the blood of my children,
on the tears of my dead wife,
on the tears of our mothers,
on the tears in the sheets of those people who are sleeping in the rain,
I indict you.

-patriot

on where love has gone

2008-01-28T15:42:00.000-08:00

Things aren't good in Kenya.
I honestly have no words for it,
just a heavy heart that sort of aches more than prays.

I'm so far away from it all here.

I went to church on Sunday perilously hung over, as I had promised to bring a friend. And during the service I was irritated with this older woman who was sitting on Joe's right with a cane with a plastic glitter filled head, who was kind of rude and overly loud and chatty during the service--just a bit off centre... And seated on my left was a woman I've realized has some serious troubles, I think she's homeless and lives in a shelter, and she comes nearly every Sunday but is jittery and has to go outside to smoke every twenty minutes or so and has this terrible permanent black crusted burn on her fingers where I guess she lets the cigarettes burn down too low. She is usually quite out of it and startles like a deer when you say hello to her--but she is also friendly and always says a sweetly eager hello back, after she gets over the shock. So she and I said hello and then she got up her nerve to ask me where we were in the liturgy booklet and I realized that she had trouble reading numbers and maybe reading altogether, so I started helping her find her place in the liturgy booklet. And then afterwards, after we finished singing Siyahamba, the annoying older woman just marched straight up to Aileen, who had just gotten up her nerve to exchange names for the first time in a year and a half of nodding acquaintance... And the woman started gently checking in with her about her life, and then gave her this huge cuddle, just seized Aileen's head and pressed it into her enormous old lady bosum, then released her, looked closely at her and said, Need another cuddle? and grabbed her again, three times in all, and Aileen was just smiling and nearly crying, and I realized that this annoying off-kiltre old woman was the first person in the church that I've ever seen touch Aileen.

So thank God for her, for both of them, and that we're all there, somehow, together, in our untidy ark of a church... No matter what state we're in. Lost, drunk, or over loud. At least we're there. Next week is art week, when we transfigure the space for Lent and I'm going to roll up my sleeves and paint all afternoon in celebration of how the church's beautiful worship space is our collective effort. Not the love we have, such as we have, or the grace. Those are gifts from God. But the paint brushes at least remain in our hands.

Maybe this is where the confusion comes in for me about things in Kenya. Where has all the love gone? and the grace? This is a nation with millions of Christians. Where are all the Christian Kikuyus, the Christian Louo, the Christian Kalenjen? Why are they not standing in front of their neighbor's homes saying No, no matter where those people were born. When did it become okay to kill someone else's family because of their ethnicity? This is not acceptable. No matter how angry you are, no matter how much injustice you've suffered under a corrupt regime for long hard years, while the elite eat of the fat of the land. It is not acceptable to kill and to terrorize each other. And I don't see how anyone can, for even one enraged second, think that it is. And my lack of understanding of how ordinary people can keep doing this to each other overwhelms me, so much so that I hardly know what to say to God.

Shall I say, remind them of what love means? Of what compassion feels like? Make them feel ashamed? Write on the sand in front of them, say, let the one without sin cast the first stone, and watch their machetes and torches and stones fall one by one to the sun-baked earth. Remind them. Remind them. Bring them back from the violence and the anger that engulfs them. Extinguish the fires, every fire, in hearts and hands and minds. Let them see people before them and not enemies. Quell the need for revenge and may only sorrow remain. Only sorrow, like a rain to wash the earth free of its blood. Only sorrow, to wash our bloody hands clean.

That is what I shall say. Let it be so.

Regarding Thought Provoking Spam

2008-01-23T05:56:00.000-08:00

I missed my self imposed deadline for the goat meat eating brother. However, I did receive some interesting Spam mail today, and I quote:

My name is Mamoon Abd Ali a citizen of Iraq ,It's my pleasure to contact you for a business venture which I intend to establish in your country,Though I have not met with you before but I believe one has to risk, confiding in someone to succeed some times in life.There is this huge amount of funds which my FATHER kept in Europe before his untimely death.

I thought this was rather nicely put... Though he has not met us before, he believes one has to risk, confiding in someone to succeed sometimes in life.

That actually sounds rather reasonable to me. Well, perhaps rather that one must sometimes trust to survive. In the dark early one morning in southern Thailand I got in an unmarked pickup truck with this strange guy who said he'd take me to where the backpackers caught the ferry out to Koh Tao, and I did wonder, as I did so, if I would pay for such reckless trust. But he was as good as his word.

I met with my advisors this morning. They said that right now I need to write about what I know, and we'll sort out the daunting theoretical framing later.

And I wonder whether perhaps it isn't recklessness that I need to write this PhD, climbing into an unmarked truck in the dark, trusting that if I say what I can, what I must, the world will receive it, and I will not be harmed. Perhaps.

I promise my brother, who is eating too much goat, to write on Saturday

2008-01-17T07:34:00.001-08:00

I promise my brother, who is eating too much goat,
and dreaming of our Vietnamese noodle shop,
bowls of steaming soup brimming over with flat rice noodles,
and rare beef, and anise and garlic, and fermented bean paste
and chili--clearly this food features in my dreams as well,
to write a thoughtful and measured post on Saturday.

I went to Israel for Christmas.
I was actually in Bethlehem Christmas morning.
In writing that sounds much more Biblical than the reality
of the present moment, which involves a big wall and
checkpoints and economic depression and angry Christian
caretakers getting into a broom fight over someone sweeping
someone's else corner in the Church of the Nativity.

Then again. Christmas, from the first, was a time of oppression,
and anger, a time of pain and and jealous kings, massacre and flight.
An unexpected time and place for good news, just like so many troubled
corners of our world today, particularly my dear childhood home of Kenya.
But good news can come unexpectedly, in a moment, in a flash, to the most
downtrodden unhappy out-of-the-way place.
Pray God it comes to us again, here now,
in all the dark places of the world that need the season of Epiphany--
stars and revelations and journeying hard and long to find the one
who can save the world.

What of the night?

2007-12-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

What of the night?
Morning comes and also the night.,
If you will inquire, inquire,
Come back again.
Beloved, I inquire, I return again—
What of the night?
-----
And it is all night lately, less light and less light and the days grown dark and ragged at the edges, curling in against the cold, and I vanish under layers of clothing and the weight of the world.

There is a lot of pain here just now, in the lives of those I love, and sometimes I feel I am swaddled in it and like an infant, struggle to get an arm free, a foot, to be just a little less bound. My nice clear path through the woods of academia ended or I wandered off of it. Either way, Dantesque, I have awakened in a dark wood, lost and lanternless.

And I need to light the lantern, with whatever comes to hand. So I am turning off my phone and disconnecting the internet, and descending into the dark well of my heart with my books and my notes and the yawning blank page, hoping to climb back out in a week's time. Wish me luck. Two quotes by wise women come to mind:

It always comes back to the same necessity:
go deep enough and there is a bedrock
of truth, however hard.
May Sarton

So finally a writer must be willing to sit at the bottom of the pit,
commit herself to stay there,
and let all the wild animals approach,
even call them up, then face them,
write them down
and not run away.
Natalie Goldberg

And now I descend, hand over hand, on the rope down into the quiet dark.

a wakeless world

2007-11-25T09:51:00.000-08:00

Mr Badger's boat--do you think he'd marry me? I could keep flowers in pots and write novels and brew tea...
It's Sunday and I am turning to memories and trivia to dispell this disquieting winter's eve. My friend Nathan and I have this endearing little habit--at least we think so--of texting each other Paul Simon's lyrics at odd moments. We were at this seriously old cemetery with the oldest tree in the United Kingdom, a yew tree, which has the disappointing habit of dying back to its roots and growing again, smaller and more spindly as the centuries roll by, so that we got to see a not all that impressive looking gnarly tree with a lovely huge ring of stones showing its ancient girth. Essentially, we had to take the tree's past on faith, and I count on trees being something you can actually put your hands on--I'm like a Tree Thomas.

Anyway, in this very old cemetery were all these old gravestones and there was one that said simply, Asleep in Jesus. This was really and truly puzzling to my friends, who aren't Christian and thus aren't used to our platitudes, and the grammar worried them too--why wasn't in asleep in Jesus' something? Jesus' arms, for example. And Nathan suddenly declared that he wanted his tombstone to say, Asleep in Paul Simon. I am telling this story simply because it makes me laugh. The story goes on and has druidic stones in a field and bulldozers chained to trees in a forest and a terrifying slither down a ravine in an enormous ball of leaves, but I'll stop at Paul Simon. Anyway, this is our favorite stanza at the moment:

A man walks down the street,
It's a street in a strange world--
maybe it's the Third World,
maybe it's his first time around.
He doesn't speak the language,
he holds no currency,
he is a foreign man,
he is surrounded by the sound, the sound
of cattle in the marketplace,
scatterlings and orphanages.
He looks around, around,
he sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity,
he says, hey, hallelujah...

It's a good thing to be able to say hey, hallelujah on a winter's night. I'm posting some pictures of narrow-boating with my uncle and aunt and cousin and husband and wee Lisa, my namesake, back in sunny July. Narrow-boating is just the most wondrous activity in the history of England--it's an epic adventure for the lazy and slow moving. With physics and navigation and landscape and boats! I was utterly enchanted, except for the frightening bits where my uncle got me to steer and I desperately clung to the tiller trying not to run us all aground. My cousin's husband Matt became the master steersman and we soon were able to whisk ourselves through the tiny narrow arched bridges with nary a screech nor scrape (this was not the case at the beginning of the day, ahem...) and I got obsessed with opening and closing the locks. Like really obsessed. At one point, my uncle pointed out that I didn't have to actually Run to open the locks, but I explained that this was somehow just part of the pleasure of it all, running-and-cranking-and-locking-and-pushing-open these mossy iron doors... I just couldn't believe that I, with a tool and my shoulder and feet braced against the gates, could get our boat to rise or fall 12 feet (while I danced madly about with excitement on the side of the canal) and then open her way to the river above or below... Basically, I Became Ratty, mad about all things with boats and river. It was just the most enchanting Wind in the Willows sort of activity. You could stop anywhere and have coffee on your gas burner or eat sandwiches. You could get out and run along the towpaths while the boat putted along behind you, bonding with the cows and the birds... Clearly, I have a little much energy for the whole slow moving aspect of this holiday, as the family pointed out--a common 'bumper sticker' on the other narrowboats--for we are talking about a world entire on these canals--read 'if you can see your wake, you're going too fast.' Anyway, here are some pictures of this wakeless world and other English holiday shots.

children's expedition by a pool, which reminded me of my own childhood
guy with flask and dog and walking stick, sitting on old Roman market square (this isn't narration so much as description, is it?)
See, I closed them in there and am making all that water pour out the gate below, the boat descends, the river behind is where we came from--I am Lock Master...
And this would be why I refused to steer the boat through most of the bridges.... Wee bit tight, no?

Witness

2007-11-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

There was this astonishing lecture tonight about ruination and afterwards there was a party and Katie was there. I taught her Khmer last semester as she prepared to return to Cambodia for the second time in her life, to volunteer at an orphanage and do some research for her undergraduate thesis in anthropology. She came across the room, we hugged, I asked, how was it? She said amazing, it was amazing. And she told me of living alone in a Khmer neighbourhood called Break Bra and how her neighbors insisted that she be in by dark and feed her noodles every morning, watching to be sure that she ate every last spoonful.

And then she said, and it was terrible, and she started to tell me stories. They tumbled out, one after the other, with hardly a pause for breath, thin stories, more just a listing of losses—five orphans dying of dengue, her own grave illness, watching a family riding a motorbike killed in front of her, giving mouth to mouth to a dying stranger covered in blood, being surrounded by machine-gun waving bodyguards when her friend overtook a powerful man’s vehicle on a road. There was so much anger, she said. I didn’t know, before, when I was a tourist, that there was so much anger. Before I could speak Khmer. And then she said, I’m bitter. I feel bitter that my family and friends can’t understand. I’m going to become a human rights worker so I can help. I don’t know if I can take it, this kind of work. I’m going to go to dinner with my friends now. And then she left, and I watched her go.

And I remembered. That this is what it is like to lose your innocence, your naivete that if you mean well you can make things better, in any world you choose. And I thought of what my friend and mentor Sue said to me the day I went to her weeping, guilty, afraid that my lack of action had cost a child’s life. Sometimes, Sue said, we are just here to witness suffering. It was not what I wished to hear. It was not why I was there, not why I had gone to rural Cambodia, not why I was enduring the incomprehension of my Khmer neighbors, the stifling heat and the long lonely evenings alone with the geckoes and a half-crazy cat. I had not gone to witness anything. I had gone to change the world, as respectfully as I could, but to change it nonetheless. To do good. To be of use. And yet. I had not realized that suffering filled the land, that it fills every land. I had not realized how dark or how vast suffering could be, that I could not stem its flow, that I would fail time and again, that I was fallible and frail and sometimes hateful.

Sometimes, Sue said, we are just here to witness suffering. I told Katie. I don’t know if she was ready to hear that, if she will be able to bear working in a world where one is confronted daily by scenes that shatter the heart. I just wanted her to know that it is normal to be bruised by your inability to save the world, and that when we open our hearts, when we open our eyes, that it is then that we are overwhelmed and battered by the cruelty of the world. This does not have to be the end of us. I still hope for a better world.

I have learned, Thomas Merton once wrote, that one cannot truly know hope unless she has found out how like despair hope is.

Poems by Sheenagh Pugh

2007-11-19T09:36:00.000-08:00

This poetess humbles me with her skill. So few words,
yet she reached my heart and stays there.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

The Bereavement of the Lion-Keeper
for Sheraq Omar

Who stayed, long after his pay stopped,
in the zoo with no visitors,
just keepers and captives, moth-eaten,
growing old together.

Who begged for meat in the market-place
as times grew hungrier,
and cut it up small to feed him,
since his teeth were gone.

Who could stroke his head, who knew
how it felt to plunge fingers
into rough glowing fur, who has heard
the deepest purr in the world.

Who curled close to him, wrapped in his warmth,
his pungent scent, as the bombs fell,
who has seen him asleep so often,
but never like this.

Who knew that elderly lions
were not immortal, that it was bound
to happen, that he died peacefully,
in the course of nature,

but who knows no way to let go
of love, to walk out of sunlight,
to be an old man in a city
without a lion.

thoughts on how we make the world

2007-11-10T06:28:00.000-08:00

I’m thinking about Mondulkiri again. And about my research interests, which are strong and rather inarticulate at this point in time. (Yes, this is a problem.) My own memories of Mondulkiri are, shall we say, elemental, stripped... I posted a few of them here back in June, Notes on a Place I Love, and I can see that stripped quality to them. I have a strong physical memory of the wind and the light and the weight of the rain—my times in Mondulkiri have always been a conscious retreat, and the conditions have acted like a spiritual trope—I have gone to the hills to let the wind and the emptiness scour my soul.

But it’s not an empty place; it never was. I have always stayed in my friends’ homes, or in a guesthouse run by a Khmer family with known shady dealings. There have been webs of relationships all around me—and the sharing of food, of stories, of troubles, the intersections of grace and violence that make up any human society. But I went there to escape the webs of my relationships in the plains below, and so my very presence there was self-interpreted as being a retreat from somewhere else. And made so by me as well, through my actions and my practices—I remember once, while birdwatching down in the valley with Lucas the dog, that I hid in a thicket when I heard voices, because I wanted to be alone and to see the landscape as unpeopled, as wild. I didn’t want to interact with other people or acknowledge other people. I needed it to just be me and the dog and the birds--who were, by the way, busy hiding in the thickets as well, also hoping that we would all just go away.

And I think that all of us in Mondulkiri do this, ‘native’ or expatriate, local or foreign. We interpret or read the landscape and the people there—including ourselves—according to our own scripts. I want to call this ethnogeography, although I suspect that ethnogeographers do something quite different. At any rate, the issue is that these landscapes and representations clash. They are contested, struggling for dominance.

Is this particular hill, for example, the sacred home of some local spirits, a prime site for a Khmer Buddhist temple, or a site for a new plot of pine trees for the Chinese plantation? And what kind of people will people the site? Worshippers, labourers, tourists?

If one position becomes dominant, everything changes. And what then will befall this highland province and its residents? Anyway, I think this is what I am interested in studying. The competing representations of (peopled or unpeopled) landscapes. Before. And now.

Huh. You have now read my attempt to articulate what I’m about. Thanks for listening. Below is a short memory about an interaction during one of my trips:

Len, the self-styled first indigenous reporter for the Bunong, wants to write about land seizure and corrupt chiefs and the neglect of Bunong orphans in the local orphanage. He works for an NGO, not a newspaper, and is supposed to be making a general easy reader paper for literacy practice that won’t offend any of the powers that be in Sen Monorom, and I, as the visiting writer, have been asked to give him some ‘journalistic’ advice. Personally, I would like him to be able to do exactly as he pleases, but he walks a fine line, with the spectre of being shut down altogether only a snap of the Khmer governor’s fingers away. We discuss what he can and cannot safely write about. Then he brings out a photo. He wants to print a publicity still taken from some tourist brochure in the Bunong news sheet. In this photo, Bu Sra women and girls in spotless traditional garb stand arrayed around the waterfall for which their town is named. He has titled it, even, “beautiful women at Bu Sra.” He wants to print a picture of the Bunong posing as traditional for the Bunong themselves. Why are they dressed like that? I ask. To sell cloth, he responds—we both know the drill. The visionary women descend to the tourists splashing about in the waterfall, then on the way home, after paying a small fare for the use of an impossibly long bending bamboo ladder down the cliff, the same tourists find wares laid out in baskets by the path—the same traditional clothing on the women, now for sale in the forest! This is clever marketing. But none of this is what Len wants to write about—this is all understood. He wants to simply print this photo of these women, with no commentary on authenticity. And I wonder, why does this photo please him? Is he trying to create indigenous pride? Is this the only decent photo of Bunong women in public circulation? Or are they truly just, in Len’s eyes, some beautiful local girls?

A Few Pictures

2007-11-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

This is my brother Jeff's photograph of a tree in Masai Mara. I can't stop looking at it. It's so Edenic it makes me want to cry or just stand up and walk into the frame and fall into another world. You know, the way the Pevensies or whatever their last names were stood looking at the picture of the Dawn Treader until the sea itself reached out and washed them into a watery Narnia...

This is my brother Mike's photograph. Somewhat less highbrow... This is me, a massive stone potato. I'm standing in one of those ancient stone jars on the Plain of Jars on the Bolaven Plateau in Laos.
This is me and my friend Nathan at a birthday party for another friend of ours, in case anyone cares what I look like at this particular juncture in time and space. My hair is now officially long and lives permanently tied up at the back of my head. Happy day.

Winter Came Today

2007-11-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

Winter came today. She’s been slow in coming;
autumn has held on hard and long. But when I
left my office at half past seven this evening the
cold took my breath away. (In case you’re overly
impressed by the long hours I keep, let it be said
that I don’t start at 8 like people on a proper work
week. I’m often in the swimming pool at 8, doing
lazy laps and panting for breath.) There are fireworks
going off all over the city—remember, remember, the
5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot…
The United Kingdom is celebrating Guy Fawke’s foiled
attempt to blow up Parliament along with the gleeful
acknowledgement that blowing things up is really really
fun. So is burning people in effigy, apparently, but that’s
a little dark for me. Besides, it’s Cold outside.

I’ve been absent from this site for ages. I’m not sure why.
I was avoiding all kinds of reflection for a while, but I’m
done with that now. I’ve gone birding a few times—it feels
like a life-affirming act somehow, like a centering, leaving
all the people in my life behind for a while, getting on a bus
by myself with my binoculars around my neck and riding all
the way out to the where the River Esk empties into the sea.
Passerine migrants have been coming through—wild geese,
and sea ducks are turning up for the winter, some from the
Arctic Circle. I saw four new species of bird on my first trip—
the goosanders and wigeons were particularly exciting. The
wigeons were in eclipse, which means that their plumage is
turning and is currently a crazy patchwork of russet and brown.
Andthey had, I kid you not, bright yellow blazes on the crown
of their heads. Think little ducks with Mohawks. They were
amazing. On a more solemn note, the wild geese called when they
flew over my head and I remembered that they are the signs of
the Spirit in Celtic Christianity and wished that I could be so
innocent and so free.

A Very Old Poem

2007-10-12T03:14:00.001-07:00

My first year out of university I lived in Uptown, Chicago. We lived at the top of our apartment building. In the bathroom was a window painted white; beyond it lay a cove in the roof. In the cove the pigeons roosted. Whenever I showered I heard the purr of pigeons, invisible but very near. If I pushed open that white window the bathroom might have filled with whirring wings,I might have been encircled by birds. This is a poem I wrote that year, 1998, about the women I worked with at Deborah's Place.

Phoenixes
I.
The company she seeks is
only that of pigeons. The
woman in a dark turban
and draping robes feeds
the birds of the city soft
white bread from her perch atop
her belongings, the heavy bags
roped together on the pavement.
Silent and Samson-like, the
birds are her voice. But one
day when I pass by Moira
is standing, shouting,
crying out at the unheeding
traffic, her pigeons flown
away in fright.

II.
Her self-confidence is a fragile
egg she clasps between ringed
fingers. What should I do
today? she invariably asks at
the shelter, and my spirit wants
to cry, Become strong. But
there are no spaces in our world
to express such hope, and so
instead she sits crafting bright
glittering jewelry like a magpie
decorating its nest.

III.
Doris is small, old, and wild,
coming to roost only at night.
Sharp-tongued, the first time
we meet she defies my feeble
offers of assistance, fiercely
cutting her own tousled hair
with the paper scissors. Tufts
pile up in her lap on a paper
towel like plucked feathers,
and sometimes she opens
her mouth and utters
oracles, leaving us dumb.

IV.
Beatrice is a maddened
hawk. Most days she
cries violence down upon
us all. Set yourselves on
fire, she says. But one day
her talons are gone, and she
sits and cries that she loves
us, drowning out the sound
of the television. It’s safer
to fly home, she mutters as I
depart, and I almost feel my
shoulders for the trace of wings.

V.
In the fourth century a Syrian
holy man crept forth at
night to observe an insane
girl. As flames descended from
heaven upon her out-stretched
hands, he cried out: Surely God
loves people who are mad like this!
There are sparks beneath
Beatrice’s nails, wisps of
smoke in Doris’s hair, tongues of
fire at the hem of Moira’s
garments—portents of
God’s fiery love. They
are birds of flame:
phoenixes. Any day
now, I expect ignition.

Some Thoughts on Dirt

2007-10-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

I just cleaned the kitchen.
I clean more thoroughly than any of my other flatmates.
I see all surfaces when I am cleaning, with a horrified eye—
each grubby corner,
each ball of lint trapped below the wainscot,
each greasy light bulb specked with moth and fly spittle.

I feel compelled to yank up each and every movable object
and scrub like hell at the detrita beneath,
to poke chopsticks down radiators to reach the hairballs hiding within,
to pry loose screws and nails and matches out of the
cracks between the wooden floorboards.
I am wild about disinfectant, mad for bleach,
fond of tossing out rags and scrubbing brushes
and opening packets of crisp new ones, which
I must stop myself from tossing after one use.

I always stop cleaning exhausted and cross,
knowing that the battle has not been won,
that some dirt has eluded me. I have to stalk away and distract myself,
today with candles and dark chocolate.
I know that this is not a normal relationship to have with dirt.

The brilliant anthropologist Mary Douglas revealed that
dirt is matter out of place—like shoes on the table in America,
no matter how clean the shoes or how dirty the table…
Life in Cambodia taught me the truth of this idea that dirt is constructed
by turning this commonplace Western notion on its head.
My maid’s attention to dirt was the exact inverse of my own.
I would come home from the office to a house
where you could eat off the floor—and you were supposed to…
Cobwebs on the ceiling and dirt on the coffee table, on the other hand,
went utterly unnoticed, these being negligible surfaces to Genta.

At term’s end at my boarding school in Kenya,
those boarders who lived in other countries were taken away to the airport—
we none of us begrudged them this,
for they spent long months away from their families,
often taking midterm holidays with those of us who lived in Kenya.
But after waving them off, we had to earn our freedom—
we were not permitted to leave until the dormitories were clean.
Our escape to the cars and trucks and planes that would take us home,
back to the arms of our families, was so close,
so tangible you could taste the longing in your mouth—
yet a sea of filth lay between.

We had daily chores all through the terms, but this was large-scale
cleaning—scrubbing the wax off the linoleum floors, for example,
and cleaning myriads of windows. Dirt was an obstacle to freedom,
the last locked door between school and home.
These cleaning days were tedious and exhausting.
Fantasia-like scenarios, such as dancing with mops
or strapping your feet to scrub brushes in flooded hallways,
never really worked that well. Sooner or later,
one gave in to the inevitable and got down
on your hands and knees and remained there.
Five years as a boarder and I can’t begin to tally how many hours
I spent up to my elbows in dust and hair
and brittle-bodied moths and muddy water.

You couldn’t just stop when you’d had enough either.
You had to be Inspected, Approved, and Released.
The legendary Miss Debbie, no longer operative in my time, thank God,
used to slip white gloves upon her hands when she entered a dorm
and run her searching fingers over surfaces.
We shuddered at the thought of those hands, those gloves.
Sometimes they actually sent us back in with a checklist
of spots that needed more work.
I’m not saying that all this hard labor was harmful,
but it does help me understand my current habits—
I clean as if my freedom depends upon it,
because it used to.

Two by Janet

2007-10-06T08:30:00.001-07:00

roof of the National Galley
Edinburghians on Calton Hill on a Saturday
Our dear Baloo posing in front of Arthur's Seat, which is, believe it or not, right in the middle of this fair city...

Sorry for the lack of writing, friends, the PhD is catching up with me.

And we're having a crazily lovely October,

clear warm sunlit days in the changing leaves,

and I have spent every spare moment running about

in the Meadows, or climbing great hills...

So here are another's words--two poems by the inimitable Janet Frame of New Zealand:

When the Sun Shines More Years Than Fear

When the sun shines more years than fear
when birds fly more miles than anger
when sky holds more bird
sails more cloud
shines more sun
than the palm of love carries hate,
even then shall I in this weary
seventy-year banquet say, Sunwaiter,
Birdwaiter, Skywaiter,
I have no hunger,
remove my plate.

Rain on the Roof

My nephew sleeping in a basement room
has put a sheet of iron outside his window
to recapture the sound of rain falling on the roof.

I do not say to him, the heart has its own comfort for grief.
A sheet of iron repairs roofs only. As yet unhurt by the demand
that change and difference never show, he is still able
to mend damages by creating the loved rain-sound
he thinks he knew in early childhood.

Nor do I say, In the travelling life of loss
iron is a burden, that one day he must find
within himself in total darkness and silence
the iron that will hold not only the lost sound of the rain
but the sun, the voices of the dead, and all else that has gone.

Go gently, love, and soft

2007-09-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

Go gently, love, and soft,
Wake not the sleeping lion,
But steal by in light slippers
Wearing tenderness like a knitted shawl.

Go gently, love, and soft,
Step through the river lightly,
Letting it part around you and rush on by—
Try not to gather up the water
But rather let it slip through your parted fingers
Blessing its sweet caress.

Go gently, love, and soft.
Near not the precipices of your soul,
Not today. Not today.
Walk safe paths, build a small cairn with fallen rock,
And offer up a prayer
for courage, gentleness, and peace.
Go gently, love, and soft.

grace, or a story I tell on certain occasions

2007-09-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

On certain occasions, more times than I can remember now, I have
sat with other women telling the stories of violence attempted or done
to us at the hands of certain men and there is a kind of grace just in the
telling and the hearing and the praise we offer each other for surviving
such things and going on, but when such rites occur, I also often tell this
story, which is not my story, but a true story nonetheless:

Two young women were visiting Cambodia and one night they stayed late
at a friend’s house and then hailed motorbike taxis to take them home. And
the drivers they hailed were evil men who had formulated a plan, and they
drove in separate directions in the dark so that the girls would lose their way.
And one girl knew instantly that the way was wrong and she threw herself off
of the back of the motorbike and was saved. But the other girl was not the sort
who paid much attention to strange places, so she did not notice that she was
being taken to a new part of the city, did not notice for a long time that she was
being taken, until the city suddenly fell away and they were on a road in the dark.
And then she hoped for the best, for she did not know her way home. And finally
they stopped, at the door of a brothel, and she knew it somehow for a place of evil
and said she would not go in, and then he drove away into a dark field and then stopped
the motorbike and fell upon her and she fought him, harder than he had expected,
and he grew afraid and released her and ran to his motorbike and drove away. And
she rose from that field in a strange land and began to walk in the dark and then she
saw a light, a candle in the window of a small wooden house. And she climbed the
stairs and she knocked and a middle-aged Cambodian woman opened the door, and
looked at the bruises on the girl’s face, and let her in. She stayed that night in the
house of the woman, and they had no language between them, but the woman sat
the girl down before her and took a brush and brushed her hair for a long long time.

I think that perhaps the image of grace does not get any stronger, any purer, than this,
than a woman in a small wooden house
on a dark night, brushing the hair of a stranger who
needed her. And I tell this story time and again so that those of us who did not
have anyone to take us in and comfort us in the aftermath of violence
can imagine what it would have been like if we did,
if we could only have had a mother’s hands in our hair,
taking all the fear and the anger and the shame away,
one slow stroke at a time.

Freedom

2007-09-16T05:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Mexican Independence Day and I walked to my Mexican friends' flat in the wind and the rain and climbed the stairs and ate flan and drank rather a lot of tequila with five humans and two beloved guinea pigs--the pigs, refraining from the liquor, ate strange woody pellets instead... And I am sure that the evening's conversation turned political at times, but since those times were in Spanish, which I don't speak, I couldn't follow, but this morning I dragged out this poem I post below, written by Vidal de Nicolas, once a political prisoner in Burgos jail--in Argentina, maybe? Clearly, I should turn to someone else's words this morning, and these are words that ring in the heart for a long time after...

A Wish

That son of Cain, let him have no more power
to loose his fury on the unfettered spring
or deal death to the kiss.
Let hatred be restrained from flooding
the pristine margins of the air.
Let knives become impotent against swallows, and the assassin
powerless to garrotte the dawn.
May war never again
batter the skulls of newborn babes, or sever
the exultant arteries of a man.
Let poisoned fangs and pistols
and slavering jaws be done away,
and nevermore let frenzy lash us
with its insensate waves.

Let nothing remain but a love
as vast as all the oceans,
pouring like a cataract across the pupils
of our eyes, flooding the planets,
filling the songs of poets everywhere.

And here is a kingfisher, for it was high time one turned up here--and may birds like this tiny malachite kingfisher in my cousin's hand live long lives full of fish and sparkling water...

Words by Rumi

2007-09-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving--
It does not matter now.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken
your vows a hundred times.
Come, come again, come.

Equilibrium

2007-09-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

I left America yesterday, but I could not tell you when.
Half a bag of pumpkin seeds,
one car, two airplanes, and three buses later,
hollow and husked,
a shell of myself,
I came back to my new flat—
which has two new flatmates,
men I scarcely know,
and a hell of a lot of dirt.

I was unhappy and my
feet were cold. I inadvertently missed
the official induction meeting
of my school this morning, and
deliberately missed the social gathering
this evening, being in no mood for
making new friends while still mourning
leaving old ones.

I gnawed on bread, fretted over my
laptop, which doesn’t travel well,
and finally set forth to the grocery store,
the one I used to go to, far from my flat,
but with familiar shelves and cannisters.
En route, I found Michael examining a traffic cone by the library.

Michael and I have a strange friendship.
He’s in his last stage of writing up his PhD,
one of those phantom people who flit in and out
of their offices at terrifying hours.
We have never done anything social together;
yet he has walked around the corner
of various streets just when I needed someone most.
This past year he helped me process
the death of my grandmother,
the stress of undergoing an HIV test,
(yah, long long story involving my foot and a hypodermic needle on a beach
in Cambodia—a story that no longer matters, praise be),
and the decision to apply for a PhD.

Michael was delighted to see me.
Michael is always delighted to see me,
which is part of the reason Michael is
a glorious friend. We processed whether
or not I can pass my transition boards on
an accelerated schedule in order to go on
holiday in May. We decided that I could,
and I proceeded on to the store. It was full
of confused new undergraduates, and I had
the singular pleasure of being able to feel
myself past those early interminable searches
for the cherry tomatoes and the free range eggs.
I know where things belong; I’m not new anymore.

Then I walked home in the late afternoon sun,
and cooked pasta with mussels, which are such
fearsome looking creatures that they cheered me up,
and two of my other guy friends from the Centre for African
Studies texted me about going to a movie together—to be honest,
I don’t think they realized I had gone anywhere, and I felt
inside my chest that slow shift of the heart
back to some strange sort of equilibrium.

Oddities for My Sweet Brother

2007-09-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

I’m told that this account amused him so I thought I’d give you my version, along with some odd pictures of our family. Mike, I'm counting on you still being in Nyala and looking at these photos with the same sense of bemusement.

The day after my arrival in New York I had a headache and accidentally took a prescription sleeping pill that, for some mysterious reason, my father had placed in the Advil bottle. Several hours after settling down with a magazine, I woke up face down on our wee dock in the sun in a state of high confusion and thought that was the end of it. We went off to uh, somewhere, to play miniature golf and eat pizza, and everyone kept teasing me and I kept insisting that I was fine.

But the fact of the matter is that I don’t remember posing for or taking any of these pictures at all. I turned on my camera in the airport in Philadelphia and ended up laughing out loud.

This is my brother Jeff and his wife Sarah, soon to be studying in Brighton for a year... But This is where it becomes Really Strange and Undignified....

I love my family.

Uncloistered

2007-09-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I leave America.
I came home seeking retreat, renewal,
thinking I would go the Abbey at the Genesee
and find silence amongst men vowed to it.
I usually see our family home as a den or a burrow—
close and warm,
full of merry company and clamour—
more than I can bear some days.
I thought to flee it
but the land kept me.
We have a pond
ringed round with forest,
and here is holiness uncloistered—
for vespers, the wind sighing in the trees
and the drumming of woodpeckers,
the water disturbed, time and again,
by unseen frogs or angels,
where you can be baptized over and over
amongst the fishes.

Once, in the poorest province in Cambodia,
a denuded region ironically named
Long Forest, we drove through a massive
grove of bamboo on the backroads.
I was standing in the bed of the truck,
an unwomanly habit which bemused my
Khmer companions, and I threw back my
head and saw a vast vaulting arch of feathery
rustling green—heart-stoppingly lovely, a
cathedral of bamboo, and I looked down
and there was a young girl and her younger sister
walking down the road, the baby with lambent
frangipani tucked behind each of her small ears.
And I forget so much, but I promised myself
to hold them and that place, uncloistered,
in my heart forever.

What will become of us?

2007-09-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

I am in western New York for two more days,
with my parents. And last night I could hardly sleep,
which I blame entirely on my friend, Dave Huth.
No, I’m kidding. But a conversation with friends
had taken a dark turn, to the precarious state of
our world, to the disasters that could soon befall us, to
those that already have, time and again, in the harrowing
history of the world, to the difficulty of holding on to hope
in times so unjust and so uncaring, and I had the awful thought—
what if those stark teachings from my childhood
where God ends the world in fire, were in fact about us—
what if we end the world? What will become of us?

And then a new friend drove me home,
talking of stars and flying. In the black
night, we startled a line of deer, their eyes glowing
like tiny moons—they ran from us, afraid,
and later, on my ceiling,
a leggy spider gathered and swung
and somersaulted along an invisible web
as if afloat, or aloft on some tenuous strand
of hope. She did not fall, and I was glad, but
we are not as innocent as spiders, as deer, and
the question remained: what will become of us?

Sleepless, I went seeking poetry, and the anthology
had included a passage from Romans, so I brooded on that:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Shall war, or genocide, or poverty, or wealth, or consumption, or greed,
or apathy, or denial, or despair, or debt, or greenhouse gases, or the loss of this
good green world?
Nay, for I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor principalities, nor governments, nor disease, nor great disaster, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor
any other circumstance shall be able to separate us from the love of God.

I believe that this is true.
But I also hope and pray, how could I not?
that these present terrors cease,
that the others that threaten do not come to pass,
that we survive ourselves,
that we can live.

Rabbi Heschel once said:
Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy.

I believe that this is true.
Yet I want so many things
from this sweet brief life
allotted to me—here is one such wish—
to stand next summer in Namibia
or my beloved Mondulkiri, in the wind
on a dark night
and see the stars clearly again.

Something gentle, something wild

2007-08-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

I. something gentle

Below is a poem written in 1927 by Kadya Molodowsky.
I don't know who she is, but I have loved this poem for years now.

Songs of Women

For poor brides who were servant girls,
Mother Sara draws forth from dim barrels
And pitchers sparkling wine.
Mother Sara carries with both hands
A full pitcher to whom it is decreed.
And for streetwalkers
Dreaming of white wedding shoes,
Mother Sara bears clear honey
In small saucers
To their tired mouths.
For high-born brides now poor,
Who blush to bring their patched wash
Before their mother-in-law,
Mother Rebecca leads camels
Laden with white linen.
And when darkness spreads before their feet,
And all the camels kneel on the ground to rest,
Mother Rebecca measures linen ell by ell
From her rings to her golden bracelet.
For those whose eyes are tired
From watching the neighborhood children,
And whose hands are thin from yearning
For a small soft body
And for the rocking of a cradle,
Mother Rachel brings healing leaves
Discovered on distant mountains,
And comforts them with a quiet word:
At any hour God may open the sealed womb.
For those who cry at night in lonely beds,
And have no one to share their sorrow,
Who talk to themselves with parched lips,
To them, Mother Leah comes quietly,
Her eyes covered with her pale hands.

II. something wild

This isn’t my picture. I’m not in the plane or lying with the lions. It was sent to my friend Paul by someone named Noel--but it’s a pretty damn fine picture nonetheless.

Ennui

2007-08-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

I have been reading books
by other footloose expatriates.
This is, in retrospect,
a mistake.
As of late, I find myself half mad
with boredom--
with the academic life,
with this everyday of small
pleasures in a good city
that holds few dangers and
fewer challenges to my heart
and my soul.

I suffer, like so many others of my ilk,
from restlessness, like malaria
in the blood, the type that subsides
and then reoccurs time and
again, in dark waves of longing.
I wish I could say I fight off its fevers,
but I usually succumb.

I have been here nearly a year.
Maybe the problem is that simple.
My life here is simple and good--
and maybe the problem is that simple.

I have grown accustomed to being in over my head,
to treading waters of rougher seas,
of my work mattering more than it ought to have,
of facing a harsh world
every day
and struggling to be honest with myself,
to keep seeing and not turn away,
to resist my own darkness and that of others.

Here we take ghost tours and talk of Old Edinburgh's
torture and violence as if it were entertaining,
which is the luxury
history affords us.
Here we joke about hell, about going there,
as if a great portion of our world were not there already.
Here I walk past the homeless people on the street
and I do not know their story
and I feel little pity,
because they're better off than a lot of Cambodians.
This is a heartless way to feel.

I am not being of any use to the poor and the vulnerable here.
Yet why should I constantly have to be of use?
Why am I not content with this time of rest and preparation?
Merton wrote once of the violence of activism, of doing and
doing and doing and never feeding the soul until we are
hollow shells of our former selves, spirit-starved.
I worry that I have something different--
an addiction for activism,
the need to be doing something for someone else
to feel life worthwhile and myself of worth--
or, perhaps, to not feel guilty
for being wealthy
and safe and fat
for not sleeping under the trees
in the mountains
without blankets,
like those my brother works among in Darfour.

I need to find the ways to feed my soul
when I cannot be an activist,
or an adventurer.
I need to find the way to be present here,
open-eyed and open-hearted here,
in this city that I,
for the time being,
call home.

Holidays and other journeys

2007-08-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

It feels like years since I’ve attended to the piece of my life this blog represents. I am sorry for that. Things have been mad, if that’s any excuse. My thesis is due in TEN DAYS. Eek. At this very moment, I’m supposed to be reading a cheery article called Agents of Death, about genocide. But fie on that!

I went on holiday, you will remember. A lovely lovely thing, holidays. I went to Italy. This is the main reason I went to Italy:

That’s Victoria and little Sofia. We’re eating gelato by the duomo in Florence. It was deliciously roastingly hot in Italy. We wandered around sweating drinking coffee and eating gelatos, looking briefly at architectural wonders. Sofia is at the what’s-there-to-eat-and-can-I-finally-run-around-rather than-being-restrained-by-various-strait-jacketing-straps stage of life. I did see Michelangelo’s last Pieta, though, where he roughly chiselled himself as Nicodemus, holding Christ in his arms. I found it a little audacious, to be honest. I’d be more likely to cast myself as Judas or Zaccheus or the dazed disciples on the road to Emmaus.

I was meditating one night and fell asleep—which happens to everyone, I tell myself—and I ended up riding along next to Christ on a pair of white horses across a coastal plain in Cambodia towards the mountains, which was clearly the end of all things. We were merry companions, and there was even a dog running along behind us, and I distinctly remember teasing Jesus about it. TEASING JESUS! And he didn’t mind.

And then I had this absolutely terrible moment, heart sinking, when I realized that I hadn’t told anyone I was leaving on this journey, this journey from which I would not return. All I could think of were those harsh verses about not turning back from the plough and the dead burying the dead, and I just knew Jesus was going to be angry or worse, send me packing, but I just had to go back and see if my friends in Phnom Penh would come with us and so I mentioned it, throat tight with misery, and he acquiesced. Just like that. He said he’d wait for me and that I could go and try to bring the others with us. None of the people I went to would come, as the dream would have it, but that’s another story. What mattered most in the dream was just how perfect a companion Christ made. I honestly think I understand the heart of God better when I’m sleeping. That’s about enough of that.

This is me and Sofia getting into taking pictures of ourselves. She was wild about the flash in her eyes, crazy girl. The next morning I got on a plane bound for Bristol and she will have forgotten me utterly by now. Good for her. Reaching an age at which you become aware that you are forever saying farewell to people you love is nothing to look forwards to.

And in Bristol I met this little wonder, my wee namesake:
Baby Lisa!!! She is a much nicer baby than I was, I think. My mother says I used to just sit and stare intensely at everybody, taking their measure.
That's the sweet lamb getting into the pasta eating thing.

Now, ahem, here’s the bad birding news from my chapter of Bad Birders of Cambodia & Friends: in all my travels to Norway, Italy, and Bristol, I saw, wait for it,
4 (4) (four) new species of birds.
Yep, that’s it.

Lots of cheerful fallen-fruit eating fieldfares
A solitary great crested grebe on Lake Maggorio (Big Lake, I believe would be the translation)
A hovering diving common tern
Goldeneyes with hysterical diving ducklings. Apparently these young ducklings are born in trees, throw themselves out of their nests, and bounce along the forest floor.

Here’s the reason why, which I’ve decided to turn into spiritual currency. The much loved people I was with weren’t into birds. So there was much mention of reservoirs and wetlands and whatnot where the birds where, and we actually shot past a knot of vest-wearing binocular-slinging English folk watching peregrine falcons nest--but no interest on my companions' part to actually get out there.

I need a community to be a birder—other wacky dedicated people willing to go on long and possibly fruitless quests, in chance of kingfishers…

I went back to church on Sunday after at least a month’s absence and realized that I need a community to be a Christian too, at least an attentive one. I’d been away so long I felt like I was watching a church go about its business rather than actually a member of its community. Like I didn’t belong anymore.
But I do.

Omens

2007-07-16T02:44:00.000-07:00

There was a brown-striped snail on the window frame beside my bed this morning. She had climbed--and what a slow laborious work of slithering that must have been! all the way up from the tangle of weeds and flowers outside my high Georgian window to the open louvre at the very top, and then over the rim and down the long stretch of wall to my bed. My new window is enormous and framed with green vines and wild garden, but it does not open. The square at the top that does open must be worked with a long iron rod with a special grip for twisting open the metal handles of the window. You can't just step from my room to the green world outside. So finding the snail seemed like a good omen, one journeyer greeting another. Not that I was kind--I opened the French doors in the kitchen and tossed her back into the rain, sat down and had my toast.

My belongings are now all stored in their new home; all that remains is for my heart to arrive. I do not own any sheets yet and am sleeping on a bare mattress under a duvet--but the mattress is good. I unpacked on Saturday, and spent three hours cleaning a wretchedly neglected kitchen. The two guys who live in the flat seemed bemused--they live on the surfaces of the flat, never throwing away any of the detrita of past tenants and lives. I even took apart and reassembled a peppermill. For no reason at all. I have a pepper mill. Looking back on it, it seems clear that the peppermill was a manageable artefact, unlike the rest of my unruly life.

I reassembled it Sunday morning sitting in the French doors. The weather was allowing a few hours of sunshine, hot on my legs, bare for the occasion, and I ate breakfast and permitted myself a few imagined moments of summer.

Then the clouds returned and the wind started to blow. And the peppermill still doesn't work very well.

I went out to a dinner party Saturday night and had my first walk home in the hours after midnight to my new flat. I now live on the corner of a large lovely park lined with trees, which I will never cross at night. So I walked along the roads, past gently swaying couples stumbling home, around construction sites, under the orange street lights, taxis flying past, testing the waters of the night. It felt pretty safe. I suppose you're wondering what I would have done if it wasn't. The usual panoply of responses, I suppose--bluff, run, rage, scream, fight, weep. Whatever is called for or possible at the time. But it seems that these will not be required, for which I am grateful.

And then there was Sunday. And now it is Monday, cold wet fog trolling the streets, the high hills and Arthur's Seat wiped from view, and I am sitting in my office, scowling at the draft of my thesis, longing for its completion.

The end is near--two days from now I will fly away to Italy, leaving the completed draft in the hands of my advisor, and then on to Bristol to meet my cousin's baby, little Lisa. All I need is to travel the pages of this manuscript one last slow laborious time, mending it as I go. Snailwork. My reward is a few days somewhere warm. With new birds. I will be back in August.
Goodbye...

saints and rain

2007-07-11T15:15:00.001-07:00

I have returned from Oslo to Edinburgh.
I didn’t see much of Norway, but
it was as I had imagined—
a few million tall blonde people,
(some largely ignored immigrants)
flush with oil wealth in a land filled
with fjords and mountains and deep
green forests and tunnels, where the trolls
wait for the unwary traveler. A land whose
denizens consume vast lots of sour
cream and berries and sausages and waffles.

We went to a park, which is full of human
statues by Gustav Vigeland. He worked on them
for twenty years between the two world wars.
They became his life’s work, and as I gazed upon
the hundreds of human figures, some in trees,
some fighting mythical monsters, most just
living, I remember Kierkegaard, writing on
saints.

The saint, Kierkegaard wrote, wills the one thing.
The saint does not bemoan the weakness of the body,
the wickedness of the heart. The saint does not heed
a frail stomach or a fragile soul. The saint pursues the
gleaming fish of truth through the passages of her mind
and soul until she hooks it, reels it in, and guts it. The silvery
scales of captured truths lie in great mounds round her
olive-skinned feet; she wipes her blade clean upon her robe
and never chokes on the bones of her emotions.
I am no saint. I float on my back in an ocean of feeling,
my sodden robes billowing, pulled this way and that, raising
the level of the sea with my endless tears.

It was raining the second day I came to his cold people
frozen in bronze and granite
they did not heed the rain
but it dressed them anyway
in watery clothing.
The rain too, does one thing,
and does it well.

O to be rain, a saint,
to do one thing well,
to do it utterly

2007-07-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

A conservation NGO recently flew over a great swamp in southeast Sudan on an aerial survey, to ascertain if there were any animals left after the long years of war. To their delight, there were. Thousands upon thousands of white-eared kob and many other antelope. And elephants. There is great excitement, there is talk of a national park. But these animals do not live an uninhabited swamp. They are in Murle territory, and that is where the story of my life begins, or very nearly. Soon after the civil war unfurled, the Murle struck a deal with the government of Sudan—arms for their allegiance. Once armed, they maintained their “borders” from their traditional enemies. Their land, in the middle of the southern forces, was officially aligned with the north. So there was little fighting in Murleland, all through the long years of the war. And its swamp became a haven. It could be possible to have a park and a Murle homeland smack dab on top of each other. I tell this story more for its sheer incongruence—that old enmities and modern weapons somehow were of benefit to the most innocent creatures among us. And I tell it with a wish—that both the Murle and the animals and all their enemies may finally have lasting peace.

Below is an excerpt from my long-unfinished novel, but the story of the moon and the sun does indeed belong to the Murle.

The stories of our beginnings matter. The myths of origin shape the world. But stories are notoriously untidy. The anthropologists have had to take matters into their own hands. They have netted the nebulous creatures. They have trussed their waving limbs, peered at them from various angles, and taken samples. They have classified them into types and set them free. We are an advanced race. We have parables and folk tales, legends and myths, epics and oral histories. Some are theoretically more factual than others. These categorizations mean nothing to the Murle people, who do not apply any standardization of belief to their tales. They do not differentiate between a folk tale, a history, or a myth. One such classification of story is the aetiological tale. These are the tales that explain how things have become what they currently are. The reason, for example, that the woodland kingfisher throws back its beak whenever it swallows. The reason the gazelle’s tail never stops wagging. The reason the leopard has spots, the ostrich a long neck, the elephant a trunk, the crow a white bib. I am telling you the reason things are as they are. I am telling you the story that comes before Eve is left alone in the floodplain. I am telling you what happens to girls without mothers.

This is the Murle tale of why the moon and the sun never meet. A long time ago the moon and the sun were both wives of the same man. They lived together in one homestead. The man was not around much. Not that it matters. Not that it would have made any difference. This is an aetiological tale. Its ending is set in stone. The moon and the sun lived together in one homestead. They didn’t get on very well. One day the sun went to collect dung from the cattle bier. The Murle people use this dung to make fires in the center of the homestead. Dung fires create lots of smoke, and this smokes helps keep the mosquitoes away from the people and their cattle. The sun went to the bier to collect dung with a cow’s rib. The moon was sitting outside her hut, stirring clotted blood with a stirring stick. The blood would have been cow’s blood. It is collected, carefully, from the jugular vein in a living cow’s neck, not more than once every six weeks. The people eat it. It gives them strength. The moon was stirring this blood in a hollow gourd with a stirring stick. The sun was collecting dung in the cattle bier. They were close enough to converse, and they began to argue. On and on they continued arguing, exchanging heated words, until it became a bitter quarrel and they ran outside of their compound and faced off. The sun took the cow’s rib and began to beat the moon. The moon staggered but hauled off and hit the sun across the head with her stirring stick in retaliation. The people ran to them and separated them. This is why the moon, struck with a rib, is white and the sun, struck with a blood-stirring stick, is red. This is why they travel on different paths and never meet. This is why the moon has great craters scattered across its body, marks from the blows of the sun.

When I first heard this tale I wept, for even the moon bears scars.

Devoured by Children

2007-06-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a children's day at my church, which means that instead of having a homily, we acted out Daniel and the Lion's Den, and all the wee children were ferocious lions. I was one of King Darius' advisors and was thus devoured by children.

Malaika returned to church for this thrilling event, having made a lion-face mask the previous week. I fear that she thinks church is much more fun than it normally is. They gave every child a book and had a bouncy castle out on the lawn afterwards and a barbecue under a marquee--it was raining, as it has been for days. The British Isles are considerately blocking the rest of Europe from storms off the Atlantic by absorbing every last drop of rain and howling cold wind for her longsuffering citizens. At any rate, we all stood around shivering and eating sausages and envying the small people throwing themselves around in wet abandon in the bouncy castle.

When I got to her house in the morning, M was leaning on her windowsill, waiting for me. Apparently she'd been up since six. Waiting for me. It almost feels wrong, how easy it is to steal the heart of a child. She wouldn't say goodbye when I left because she's cross that I'm leaving for Norway.

I won't be posting anything much there. I'll post some pictures when I get back. Even bad bird shots, perhaps, as I'm going to a Whole New Bird Zone. Yee-ha.

But I'll leave you with some astonishingly beautiful photos. These photos were taken by a guy whose name is, I think, Craig Parker. The titles are his. He has many more unusual images on www.flickr.com/people/panic-embryo if you're out there, browsing...

The Bridge

The Gathering
Perch

Cambodia Redux

2007-06-23T10:50:00.001-07:00

I'm missing this country today, as another grey dusk falls in Edinburgh...Missing the fish that were caught in nets like this by the rice fields, deep fried, and eaten bones and all.
Missing the color of rice. No doubt the back-breaking labor of transplanting rice shoots in mud all day would change my nostalgia--but, in my defense, the city people love the rice too.

Anyway, I close with my favorite language primer text in the world. It's from SIL materials of the 1960s in highland Vietnam, and is of a language closely related to the Bunong tongue spoken in Mondulkiri:

Central Mnong Language Lessons, Richard L. Phillips, Y Kem Kpor

Lesson Fifty-Nine (59)
Are there rats in America?
Yes, but we don't eat them.
We Mnong like to eat rat meat.
Do the Mnong eat the rat's tail?
Yes, we usually eat the tail and also the feet.

Lesson Fifty-Eight (58)
Yesterday afternoon a rat sprang my trap and was caught.
A cat didn't catch it, the trap got it.
The trap trapped the rat, I got him and he was already dead.
I took it from there and threw it away.
This morning Nek took it, roasted and ate it.

Lesson Sixty (60)
How do you roast rat?
First you singe off all the hair.
After that get water and wash it till it's clean.

After washing it, cook till it's done. When it's done we'll eat it.
Can rats bite?
If they bite our hands, we'll have a sore.

Much better than Dick and Jane and the little dog Spot, hmm? Maybe when I get to Mondulkiri in 2008 I can finally try some rat for myself... I'm thinking No to the tail and the feet, though. Rat's feet? Can there be any meat on a rat's foot?

Norway and Nauticalia

2007-06-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

The weather outside is frightful, but I don't care, because on Tuesday I’m headed to sunny Norway. I’ll be writing up my thesis alongside my colleague Kate, who lives in Oslo, with some bird-watching and fjord-swimming breaks.

I can’t wait. On the down side, this means writing up a long way from the library, so the week has been swallowed up in reading and writing notes on everything my argument might lumber over...

I needed a little break from the academics, so I am writing up some advertisements from Nautacalia for your perusal. N. is this male-oriented J. Peterman-style catalogue, James Bond adventurer type meets bourgeousie (can Anyone spell that word Ever?)values extravaganza. It gets sent to my friend Laura for reasons unknown. I have to admit that I find this catalogue Hilarious. Maybe just because it offends me in so many different ways.

So here’s some random copy from Nautacalia, without alteration on my part:

We owe the hammock to Christopher Columbus, who discovered Caribbean Indians sleeping in cotton nets slung between trees.

Lifelike Models of Intrepid Ships’ Cats
Cats have been welcome aboard ships as rodent catchers for thousands of years...Our models...are surprisingly lifelike and most uninitiated people will go up to, and start stroking them without realising they are models! ...The sculptures are formed from cardboard and the coats are hand-coloured rabbit pelts, a left-over product of sustenance food farming in northern China, where the ingenious artists work.

Mrs. Chippy (actually a tomcat!), recruited by Sir Ernest Shackleton to control rodents on his ship Endurance, sunk by pack ice during his illfated 1914-16 Antarctic Expedition. Along with everything else that was not absolutely necessary, Mrs Chippy had to be sacrificed despite her popularity with the crew, as there was no spare food.

Yes, this is Mrs. Chippy. I stole him off their internet catalogue, www.nauticalia.com

Kalashnikov Watches: Rugged and Reliable—Just like the Gun

Mikhail Kalashnikov was drafted into the Red Army at the start of the Great Patriotic War. Hospitalised, and outraged that the enemy had automatic weapons whilst his compatriots could only fire single shots, he set to inventing a new gun to help defend the motherland. His AK47 was brilliantly simple and brutally effective—with only eight moving parts it was easy to build, easy to service and highly tolerant of abuse. Today, Lieutenant General K. puts his name and efforts into the development of more peaceful machines, but built to the same principles.

The Globe That’s a Bar!

Gentlemen often liked to discus the shape of the world and perhaps their next ‘voyage of discovery’ over a glass or two of something special. ‘Bar Globes’ were thus a natural progression and became an essential piece of furniture for the well-equipped 17th century home...

And you can even buy shipwrecked items, should they tickle your pocketbook. What's amazing is that the stuff in the photos looks Exactly like the Vietnamese pottery available in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh, the celadon bowls and the blue and white dishes... Hmm.

Rare Chinese Porcelain from the Desaru shipwreck c1830

The Desaru shipwreck was discovered by Sten Sjostrand in May 2001, lying off the Malaysian coast at a depth of 60 feet. Buried in thick silt, its porcelain cargo had been protected for over 170 years...She is thought to have been sailing for the port of Malacca, and there is some evidence of fire, which may indicate the involvement of pirates—who were prevalent at the time—in her sinking...All of these items have been hand picked by us at the wreck retrieval sites, and will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity...

Right, that's about enough of That. Poor Mrs. Chippy, eh?

Refusal

2007-06-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

A lot of contemporary anthropologists are populists, as in pro-marginalized people groups, and a lot of us have taken to writing about resistance and hegemony (oppressive dominating forms of power). A while ago I read an interesting essay by an anthropologist named Sherri Ortner, which was about ethnographic refusal to recognize and acknowledge that which doesn't fit with our platform. She accused a lot of the resistance writers as ignoring the members of a population or group who don't resist, who collaborate with the dominators for power or profit etc. She accused us of being starry-eyed romantics, basically--of overstating our case by refusing to write about the bits that don't fit.

I've been thinking of her last night and today because I have been on a brief and sweeping review of Cambodian history, particularly the Khmer Rouge era, when about 2 million Cambodians died--and hundreds of thousands more had died in the war in the years preceding the KR victory. I saw something I didn't like in one historian's account, so I sort of ignored it in my mind, and then I saw it in two more articles today, and realized that I'd been engaging in exactly the kind of refusal she was talking about.

Here's the gist of it--a number of sources argue that 'forest people,' highlanders, made up some of the early Khmer Rouge forces. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, two of the Maoist intellectuals who were the architects of the Khmer Rouge, lived in the northeast from 1967 to 1970, with some of the highland peoples. And they liked them a lot and actually employed hilltribe guys as their bodyguards until late 1977, when the northeast minority groups were also purged for not being 'pure Khmer.'

It was something I really didn't want to hear--it made me realize that I have this framework in my head that argues lowlanders oppress highlanders and always have done and that realizing that some highlanders were actually complicit in Pol Pot's agenda complicates this picture.

It's funny how hard it is to stay objective. The other thing that mightily upset me in my reading was finding out that Phnom Pros, the hill temple just outside of Kompong Cham, the pretty town where I spent my first year in Cambodia, was a major execution centre--they estimate 10,000 Cambodians were slain there and buried in mass graves all around the base of the hill.

How could my Khmer companions bear to go there? None of them mentioned this to me. We took the girls from the shelter there at Khmer New Year and everyone danced in circles with the crowds of local folk and threw white powder and water at each other. I suppose it's a testimony to how life goes on, regardless of the horror of the past, but it also makes me sad. I don't think I could have danced if I had known I was dancing over unhallowed bones. So much of Cambodia lies just below the surface like that, badly buried, rising from time to time like ghosts and unsettling us all.

Dream of Serpents and My Father

2007-06-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was North American Father's Day, and although he Does Not Blog, I told my father I'd write something about him. But I'm a little busy, so I'm using yet another old dream of mine. This is my favourite dream about my father... And some lovely random coral snakes from google images...

Dream of Serpents
I am back in the first house I ever knew, our house in Sudan. The concrete block walls perspire and steam from the heat of the sun. I am standing with a great crowd of strangers and my father. When I look up, I see that the ceiling is all strung with snakes, writhing garlands of serpents. They wear the vivid colors that herald venom: scarlet, emerald, and onyx; they are banded and solid, bright-eyed and flicker-tongued. I am frozen with fear. One of the snakes detaches itself from the others and darts across the ceiling to the door, flashing over our heads like lightning. It is followed by another, then another. Somehow I find my voice. The snakes! I cry to my father in great fear. He looks up and begins to recite their names: identifying each poisonous species as it passes over us, like Adam. He knows what I only fear. He does not even acknowledge my fear in all his intense and joyful naming of serpents. And then he and all those unknown people are gone. The house is on the edge of the Sahel—there are small villages scattered between the dunes. It is cool and quiet. The snakes are gone. Instead, two friends are present. We are, each of us, seated with our backs to a different wall. The room is vast and cavernous; we are very far apart. One friend hums, the other is organizing her life in the pages of a book. I am sick with longing to be able to remain here, on the margins of the world, in a cinderblock clinic where the women bring their babies for the precious vaccines. Yet I know that it is a dream and that soon all of us will wake; I know that we have so little time.
*
I love this dream with my father like Adam. He is a namer, a collector of knowledge, and I am like him in that respect. And I do wonder about this dream--would knowledge of the serpents remove the venom of its fangs? Was my father safe because he knew each snake by name or had he just replaced fear with joy? If I knew all the world, if I understood it, would it lose its power to wound and stun and destroy?

A Weary Christ

2007-06-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've mentioned Jesus once yet in this online journal. It wasn't on purpose. I love Jesus. I've noticed that when I write I often write Christ rather than Jesus--maybe because I secretly feel it's more Sophisticated, maybe because I like the distance between me and my child self and saying Jesus diminishes that space, pulls me right back to illustrated Bibles and enforced devotions and songs we sang too often. But my child self needs some redemption. And I think avoiding the name of Jesus is a habit that I might need to break.

Anyway. I'm really tired right now, and I wanted to post something about Jesus, and I thought of this old reflection of mine:

On the 14th Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew
Christ is weary. He has asked the disciples to go off in a boat, he dismisses the crowds, and he climbs a mountain to pray alone. Down he comes, now, so tired that he hardly distinguishes between the molecules of earth and water—all elements turn and quicken beneath his feet—so weary perhaps that he does not even consider his action as he steps out upon the water as if it is dry land. He threads his way through the swells, rising slightly, descending, foam streaming between his toes, fish turning, turning, beneath him. Slowly he traverses the waters to that small boat full of humans he loves. There they are, finally, their craft plunging wildly to and fro, swollen with water, their eyes ringed with exhaustion. Their faces whiten with panic as if a sea dragon pursues him, as if the Tempter has returned to gyre whirlpools into motion and draw sea spouts up to the sky. But no, nothing hunts him, it is him they fear, as they have from the beginning. Have you noticed that Divinity is always telling humanity not to be afraid? Why did you doubt? Jesus asks those men in that small swaying boat. Why do we doubt? Doubt love, doubt goodness, doubt that light will overcome darkness? What can we say to our weary God on the water with waves rolling over his ankles? That we do not trust ourselves? That our children are so very fragile? That a great wind is blowing and we are but grass and ashes and dust? Have mercy on us, God. Make us better than we are--braver, gentler, more loving. Overcome our unbelief; destroy the darkness in us. May we be willing to lay down our lives for one another. May we be able to believe in love no matter what befalls our weary world. May we also leave the solid ground for the shifting swells, and may we not drown. And may we not drown.

Beasties of Scotland

2007-06-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

There aren't enough photos on this blog, I fear.
Mainly because I take bad bird photos. It kind of goes with the Bad Birder of Cambodia territory.

But as I am on my home computer, trying to screw up my courage to revisit my thesis outline, I realized that I could and perhaps should put up a few other photos on the beautiful and bizarre beasties of Scotland.

Sheep on the Isle of Arran. Very pastoral day-in-the-life shot. I love the wild olive look of the wind-shaped tree behind them.

We have sexy cows in the Highlands of Scotland. Having now lived here for 9 months, I find myself envying the woolly windblown hide.Seal, chilling. And stretching a bit--foolishly, it turned out, taking his eye off jealous rival rock-stealing seal sneaking up on the right side of the rock...
O, to be a seal.
I'm not joking. This seal is in nirvana, and all it took was rock, a fish, and some sunlight.

Now I'm going to do some work. Honest.

Girls in Church

2007-06-16T04:23:00.000-07:00

I was drinking wine with Malika’s mother one night this week,
and revealed that my parents were Missionaries in my youth,
and she half choked, and I said, come on, didn’t you know my family
is Christian? And she said, I know you go to church, and told me that Malika’s
nanny used to take her to church and then, improbably, asked if I
would take Malika to church, and I said, if she likes, and she said
she believes
nothing
but she wants Malika to have an open mind,
and I said she’d be the only little black girl in an ocean of
white folk,
and her mother said, well, this is Scotland, and besides,
haven’t you been the only white girl sometimes,
did that hurt you? And I said no,
and her mother said to Malika, curled up on my lap,
some people believe in God and some people don’t
and I don’t but Lisa is going to take you to church like
your nanny used to and some people say God is a He
and some a She, and Malika said
God is a He.
And her mother and I both looked askance and asked how she knew
and she said
God told me.

So tomorrow I’m taking Malika to church, which I am a little uneasy about.
What if the other children treat her like an exotic flower?
Shades of my youth, visiting America, Sunday School rooms full of strange
children with stupid questions about Africa, until I got tired of explaining and
would say yes, I had my own camel, and yes, we all knew Tarzan, and no, we often didn’t have enough food.
There’s nothing like lying in Sunday School to confuse your sense of spirituality.

I have other concerns.
How am I going to explain theology to a 6 year old if she asks?
I’m far too ecumenical for this.
What if she converts?
I know, I know, I sound like the Worst Christian Ever.

My brother Jeff has suggested that I blame my evangelical childhood for
everything,
but he’s wrong.
I’m not saying that I didn’t have my angry phase in college,
largely based on a sense of injustice of the Why Did No One Ever Tell Me Any of This? variety, but that’s largely sorted.

I recall, several Christmases ago,
various Adkins, my brother Mike and I, on the old airstrip in Kijabe, drinking wine,
(does everything wonderful happen over wine?)
establishing, once and for all,
that our somewhat restricted childhood on a mission station hadn’t done us any harm,
had in fact served us well,
but just didn’t fit anymore.

The thing is, it never fit for me, not in terms of spirituality—
spiritual personality, if you will, spiritual style, the way one best communes with God.
The public-ness of the evangelical tradition was a bad fit—
I still remember the keen dread of the last night of Spiritual Emphasis Week,
when the microphone was open for all our peers
to go to the front of the auditorium,
climb the stairs,
confess their sins and recommit their lives to Christ.
No one got saved, we were all saved already,
and those of us who weren’t were sitting in the back
living their own lives.
It wasn’t just the torment of the emotional pressure on my young soul
to enact out such public ritual,
though I never budged from my seat;
it was the horror of watching others do it, of having to listen to them
unburden their souls.
It always felt
too personal,
like having intimate matters forced upon you.
Plus, as far as I was concerned, they were always the most pious of students anyway,
confessing petty sins,
like walking past a piece of rubbish,
which apparently Christ would have never done.
Those were the early days of the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets,
a question I found
confusing.
I mean really, how would you know?
It struck me then, and strikes me still,
that if Jesus had been on his way down to the bier of the son
of the widow from Nain,
that he would have walked past all kinds of rubbish
straight to her side.
But I diverge.
Is public-ness a bad thing?
Am I suggesting that religion should be private? Secret?
No, I am not. I think what did me no favours as a child was that all this public talk
assumed or prescribed that we all felt and operated the same way inside ourselves, because we believed the same things.
And that is my main issue with the Christianity of my boarding school.
And it stems from years of listening to talk about how I should be feeling,
trying to have those right feelings, or manufacture those right feelings, and experiencing the unease of not having them—
asking myself, over and over, does Jesus not talk to me or make me have a glow of inner joy or put a song in my heart
because I am doing something wrong?
And not wanting to be found out, the good Christian who was dead inside.
Only I wasn’t dead inside. Ever. God was always there, and I was always there, loving each other. I just hadn’t yet found what made the shoots of my spirit unfurl and grow.

So I swung pretty far the other way on the pendulum of Christianity
when the choice arose, to the Anglican Communion with its love of liturgy,
to various communities committed to social justice and acts of mercy,
to worlds where no one prescribes how you worship and how you feel.

It was such a relief, that permission to fall silent.
And some days I think that this is why people take vows of silence and mystics like Julian of Norwich commit themselves to live in one room for the rest of their lives and only talk to people through a wee window--
so they can concentrate on listening to the voice of God,
however that voice comes to them.

So evangelidzo, to testify, about my faith,
is not something which comes easily to me.
It never has, and it probably never will.
But I am taking Malika to church,
and we will see what else God has to say to her.

Understand

2007-06-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

I have spent an entire week working on one abstract.
One bloody outline.
Of an argument that I just can't seem to lay out as a sweet logical little skeleton. Instead, the bones of the argument poke up every which way and every model collapses when I step back to take a look. And when I get so far inside my head I can hardly even bring myself to talk to other people for fear of shrieking at them. And I have somehow lost my confidence and become this O what if he doesn't like it person in relation to my supervisor, who is trying to help me find my way.

It's hard to imagine that doing practically nothing is so Hard. And I'm not dealing particularly well with the stress.

But I guess that’s why I’m here, after all. To learn how to do this kind of thinking, this kind of research—the effort to understand one another, from society to society, person to person, heart to heart. At the moment I want to say that it doesn't matter if we don't understand each other as long as we look after each other, and go running back to my development activist world—but how can we love each other if we do not understand one another? As I recall, we did some good and also some damage storming around where angels fear to tread. Maybe the damage would be lessened if we understood things a little better. Perhaps I am a bit of an intellectual after all. I am tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to write about why Khmer development workers are so ambivalent about change. And I am doing this because I want to understand.

And that reminded me of this quote by Baruch Spinoza that I used to bring myself back to in Cambodia, time and again, when living in another culture got hard:

Do not weep.
Do not wax indignant.
Understand.

I never followed it very well. I did a lot of weeping and a lot of waxing indignant. I still do. But I also have found myself on a journey that I think will never end--the journey to understand and then to translate that into writing--which is one kind of testimonio, bearing witness.

I need to see this world of academic writing as another kind of translation, another kind of testimonio, another search for understanding. Then it will perhaps become not only endurable, but a quest. And I like quests. Quests are exciting. Ride on, Quixote, to the endless line of windmills and the search for a life worth living! That sort of thing.

Mystics and the soul like a heavy bird

2007-06-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

I keep forgetting to post this thing I wrote--I had promised to return to the little-known medieval mystic Mecthilde of Magdeburg and her bird-work.

Is she truly little-known? Well, we’re not talking about a woman of Hildegarde of Bingen’s status. I stand in straight-up awe of Hildegarde, Germanic warrior priestess, with her ciphers and her herbal remedies and her choral compositions (her Canticles of Ecstasy are still performed), dressing her nuns in white and marrying them to Christ in mystical bridal ceremonies, breathing down fire on corrupt bishops… Yet her visions and her writings are too bracing for me, I admit it. I prefer the soft mystics—Julian of Norwich in her hermit’s cell, seeing that all will be well… John of the Cross with his love poetry for God… And my dear St. Ephraim, who instead of sitting on a pillar like his Syrian counterparts, wrote theological hymns for a women’s choir… In case you’re wondering, on one of those many life paths we end up not taking, I would have studied Christian mystics. Instead, they are just old and strange friends, and I take license with their works.

Like Mecthilde. I’m forgotten all of her showings except the one that caught my imagination. She saw the undisciplined soul like a great heavy bird—like a kakapo, maybe, New Zealand’s flightless parrot, or the hapless dodo.
The soul wishes to reach the sun, that is, mystical union with the divine, but it is near pinioned by gravity. Its first efforts are feeble and slow. It is too heavy to fly, too weak to flap for long. An earth-bound bird of a soul. But if it struggles on, persevering, it gradually becomes stronger and lighter, until the day it is able to fly. And on and on, stronger and lighter, lighter and stronger, able to fly higher and higher until the day it finally reaches the sun and becomes one with God.

I think this is a brilliant image for the practice of spirituality. For the spiritual disciplines, to be catholic about it. I find any kind of spiritual effort terribly hard at first, be it contemplative prayer or lectio divina or fasting or silence or plain old-fashioned mercy. The soul, or the heart or the mind, does not find it easy to fly. And I don’t know that such flight is a linear path, like Mecthilde did, but I do know that such disciplines grow easier with time and feel nearly impossible after long neglect.

I guess I should be clear about this—this image isn’t about salvation, about flapping one’s way to God’s side on one’s own wings. This is about seeking communion, a life closer to God, a life in which there are no guarantees.
And to me that seeking means putting oneself in the way of the Spirit, in case that unpredictable wind happens to blow.
And it’s the seeking that I think is so hard at first for the soul, the lazy flightless soul that prefers to stay close to all the lovely worms and beetles in the rich earth.
And it’s the seeking that I think becomes easier the longer the soul tries to fly in such a way.
I think that God can blow any flightless bird off its feet.
But I’d rather be in the sky, learning to fly, looking for the faintest wind, not wanting to miss a moment.

Corner Store

2007-06-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

I went to the corner store
all wild:
My hair unwashed,
shoulders draped in a Cambodian shawl,
wearing a sarong over sheepskin boots.
I went to the corner store
all wild
to buy a Diet Coke.
The store was full of unexpected men.
The recycling team, in their yellow reflective jackets,
had stopped their truck for a break.
They took one look at me
and nodded me to the front of the line.
Perhaps they thought I was ill,
or mad,
or a genius distracted.
I came back from the corner store
all wild
and looked in the mirror,
and laughed.

Resistance is Useless

2007-06-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

I'm actually at the library. Next to me are three tomes:

Anthropology Today, circa 1953
Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge--I can't begin to tell you what that means and may not be able to explain even After reading the wretched thing
Power and Knowledge

Thus go my 'breaks' from the office these days. But I'm listening to Gillian Welch and eating organic white chocolate. And writing a quick post. So life could be worse.

This post is about a new person in my life, six year-old Malika Bah. Malika means angel in Kiswahili. Malika is angelic occasionally, when she is sleepy. Most of the time she is fierce and energetic and playful, a little girl from Sierra Leone growing like a weed--she's always showing ankle beneath the edge of her trousers. Her mother is doing a PhD and raising two kids on her own here in Edinburgh. So sometimes Malika and I go on outings. I'm attempting to inculcate an interest in birds in her unsuspecting soul (see that bird? what kind of bird is that? Umm... It's a mute swan, remember? Keep your hands out so she can see that you don't have any bread and doesn't come over here...) so that she can become the 4th member of the Bad Birdwatchers of Cambodia when she is older--you've got to start 'em young.

On Saturday she and I and a new friend and her 2 year old daughter and 7 seven year old neice went to the Children's Museum together. There we established once and for all that the Children's Museum is not particularly interesting if one is 6 or 7 or 2. In hindsight, Malika was cross with me for making her share our time with some strangers. She and the 7 year old, another colt-like girl, took their sweet time warming up to each other. In the meantime, Malika engaged on a variety of boundary-pushing behaviors--demanding to leave, taking off suddenly without warning for another level of the museum on her own--in the historic capital of body-snatching, mind you! (There's nothing like being out with someone else's little girl in a big city to push me into a state of constant vigilance and nervous paranoia. Where's a beast-infested wilderness when you need one?) Why is this fun, she inquired to me, as we stared woefully at the vast array of old and mouldering dolls behind glass. Why indeed?

We gave it up and finally hit the streets. This is when I realized that children play in the same way in the city that I played in the bush as a child. They crawl under sandwich boards, sit on the dirty streets and slide around on shop windows, blithely ignoring the passersby. Malika and the other girl suddenly decided that they liked each other and took to walking backwards down the winding streets. By the time we reached the park, they were friends for life. It was a park with steep near-vertical sides, and I sat down with the Adults while the Children climbed up and sprinted down the sides. At some point all the shoes came off.

And then, forgetting what is was like to be 7, I told her without warning that we had to go immediately, as I had to get her home and then head off to another appointment. I essentially wrecked her world without warning. She was completely undone. I asked her to put her shoes on. The angel flat out refused. Fine, I said, and picked up her shoes in one hand, took her hand firmly in the other, and said our goodbyes. I then set off straight up the side of the hill, past the grass into a world of sticks and dirt. I don't want to go this way! the angel protested. Then put on your shoes, I suggested brightly. The angel fell silently defiant. She climbed through the sticks and the dirt while her evil guardian kept a guilty eye out for broken beer bottles. We reached the street. The angel remained defiant. We crossed the cobbled main road, stormed down the rough pavement all the long way to bus stop, the angel limping along from the rocks but keeping up. Finally at the bus stop, I resorted to the most awful adult threat of all--the threat of separation. If you don't obey me, I can't take you out, I said, hating myself. She went very silent and submitted to having the shoes put on.

The bus came. It wasn't the right bus, she said tearfully. It would do, I said, and dragged her on it. While I was paying, she escaped and went and pitifully tried to hide in the back of the bus by curling up between two seats. I sat down next to her. She wouldn't speak to me. I didn't speak to her. We sat in perfect silence for about 15 minutes.

Then she spoke. I'm very tired, she said. I'll bet, I said. She lay down with her head in my lap and sucked her thumb all the way home.

I let her linger over a lovely tomcat on the way to her door as a kind of penance on my part.

Religious People

2007-06-11T04:33:00.000-07:00

I went and saw Deepa Mehta’s Water last week, the last film in her elements trilogy. These films have made Mehta many enemies and many admirers. I fall firmly in the admirers camp. If I can someday do with words what she does with film, I will die happy. Water is a beautiful and shocking and heart-wrenching film set in India in 1938, not one for the faint of heart. But one of the things that struck me most about it was that everybody in it was a believer, a member of a religion. All Hindus. Except Gandhi, who gets portrayed as if he’d given up the pursuit of God for the pursuit of truth, which I take some issue with... But that aside, everybody is Hindu. And some of them are innocent, and some have blood on their hands. Some are cruel and hypocritical and others devout and earnest. Some are merciful and some are calculating. Some serve their faith and others use it for their own gratification. One of the most spiritual characters in the film is a young widow who used as a whore by high-ranking Brahmins—despite everything, she manages to keep hold of her faith, until love and despair undoes her.

Mehta is braver than I in her decision to have this enormous panoply of religious characters, some good, some bad. I noticed some time ago that everyone—well, almost everyone, in my Sudan novel believed in God. But some of them are awful people. And this gave me a long and unresolved pause, which I think stems from a heretofore unexplored concern that, as a Christian, I should not have Bad Christian Characters. That if I am to have Christians in my writing, I should only write about ‘good’ Christians--devout Christians, or at least ones with reasonably sound theology. But this seems to me now to be foolish. Mehta had the courage to hint that Hindus, devout or otherwise, are still just people. And so are Christians—just people, a motley crowd of people—some of us well-meaning, some of us loving and merciful people, and some of us downright wicked. And it would be nice if God turned up and knocked all of us wicked and hypocritical Christians off our horses like He did for Paul and demanded, What are you doing to my people? But God doesn't always do this. God seems to largely let us get on with it, for better or for worse.

And that, I suppose, is what I like to write about--how we get on with it, for better or for worse.

What if?

2007-06-08T04:14:00.000-07:00

My wolf poem appears quite Jungian, look at this quote of his:

But what if I should discover that the very enemy himself is within me,
that I am the enemy who must be loved--
what then?

Houses and houses and houses

2007-06-08T03:43:00.000-07:00

I have to move by the middle of July. This is my own fault. I have a flat and a kind flatmate, but I promised another friend that we would find a place together. This is proving difficult, but I have already given my notice. So I must move. I hate moving house. I hate it more than anything else that I can think of, and yet I do it, over and over.

One dark day in Cambodia a couple of years ago, the day when I came closer to despair than I have ever come, I found myself crying, I want to go home over and over again. Drying my tears, I pondered this rather absurd statement. What was it that I wanted? Where was my home? Was I just reverting back to the early misery of boarding school? Did I mean that cold stone mansion in Limuru with its kingly garden and endless fields of brilliant green tea, our first home in Kenya, the one I left for the dormitory with its linoleum floor and antiseptic bathrooms? Was Sudan home? If it ever was, it certainly isn't now.

The fact of the matter is that I don't think I have ever had a home. I've just had houses. Places I've lived with people I've loved. Houses and houses and houses. I'll revisit this, but for today I wanted to post a piece I wrote about two houses in Cambodia--well, ostensibly it's about houses. It's truly about looking for home.

...I lived for a time in a tiny walled villa with a fairytale garden: pots of floating lotus flowers lined the courtyard, a pomello tree hung her heavy thick-skinned green fruit over the verandah, bamboo rustled along the walls. I lived for a time with an Englishwoman in that precious villa, but I could not stay there. I could not breathe in the miniature rooms of the house; I could not bear our gated and guarded street where I knew none of our neighbors except for our shrewd landlady and her fragile spinster sister who worked as our maid. Sokhay came with the house. She worked for both houses; we paid her a salary, her sister’s contribution was room and board and a life of indentured service. Sokhay’s voice was always apologetic. She stroked our arms like someone petting a cat, desperate to please, and cringed each time she erred as if we might cuff her on the side of the head. One day she announced her engagement to a naturalized French Khmer machinist looking for a wife. She had never met this man, who remained in France, sending a family member to arrange the match instead. She was forty years of age and I had assumed that her relatives had resigned themselves to her unmarried state. I asked why she had agreed to the proposal and she told me that she would rather take the chance of life at this stranger's side than continue to live in her sister's home. She spoke French, after all.

Her niece had been married three months earlier in a stunningly expensive wedding in a great hall. Thousands of dollars had been spent and the bride had appeared in two guises: first as a princess of Angkor, draped with gilt and gold, and secondly as a Western bride in a floor-length white satin gown, a filmy veil, small white flowers woven in her long dark hair. But for the girl’s aunt no such effort was made. She was a traveling bride, leaving the nation and continent of her birth for a marriage and life to a stranger in a far off land. Her dowry consisted of two suitcases and a great package of dried fish made by her sister. I sat under their porch and watched the landlady scale, debone and slice a basket of fish that were transformed into fans of peach-colored flesh still joined at the tail, to be marinated and dried. My flatmate was indignant about the whole affair; I more resigned. Did she want to go? I inquired. Oh yes, she said. Maybe it will be better. She did not speak a word of French, and I squeezed her arm in concern and we gave her an envelope full of money and then she was gone.

I left soon after Sokhay did. I wanted to live alone near my office in the city. I moved to a cement and tile apartment, a single long suffocating rectangle on the second floor. My new landlords were dentists. A placard of an enormous set of hand-painted gums hung outside our gate to advertise their services; a small crowd usually waited on stone benches inside our compound. Their office stood across the cement compound from the apartments; the surgery had an uncurtained window facing the stairs. My landlady did most of the surgery. When I crossed the courtyard she was often bent over a patient seated in a black reclining chair. She would stop probing in the patient’s wide open mouth and wave a bloody gloved hand. I would wave back.

My apartment had a set of inner stairs to the roof of the building. I thought I would have this roof to myself, but the landlord’s Chinese parents had a longstanding claim. They had a key to the padlock on the back door. Each evening they slowly ascended the outside stairs to my home, passed through my spare kitchen, and climbed the inner steps to the roof. On the roof they had strung mosquito nets and hammocks, rigged up a fluorescent light with a long extension cord, and arranged a series of cots and wooden krays. Each morning they descended, their flip-flops slapping against the tiled floor, swept the stairs with a straw broom and left the door unlocked. I begged and pleaded to no avail. They were not accustomed to locking doors. They trusted in the barred gate and three German Shepherds who tore about the compound barking every night and slammed their huge furry bodies against the constraining bars of their cage in a frenzy whenever I passed by.

The apartment had white walls and a high ceiling, but all its windows faced west. The house was a furnace. I gave up entirely on sleeping in its stifling confines and moved up to the roof with the Chinese grandparents and whichever members of the extended family were visiting. I slept in my sarong beneath a single cotton sheet and a synthetic plaid blanket on a spare kray. They listened to their radio and rocked the grandchildren in hammocks; I read novels; we all relished the wind blowing across the roofs of the city. I lay awake longer than my Cambodian companions did at night and rose an hour later at six o’clock in the morning. After half a year I awoke one morning and found myself again. Who were these strangers lying under the thin veil of a mosquito net not two feet away from my own supine body? Why was I living in a furnace with a perpetual stream of unknown relatives tromping through my house, some of whom persisted in using my tiny bathroom? Why was I living in a compound with three dogs I despised, whose barking interrupted all my dreaming? I had never hung a single painting on the wall nor bothered to change the ugly curtains. I had lived there in a dream and when I awoke I swung open the doors and left.

Three Dreams

2007-06-06T03:05:00.000-07:00

I.
Three brides stand on a beach facing a wild sea. On the sea’s horizon is an island, where our weddings await. We run into the waves and begin to swim. But the sea is rough and our gowns Gothic, with long trains and long veils, and they wrap round our legs and pinion us, and though we swim and swim, we make no headway against the fierce swell. So we unfasten them and kick free and swim with sure strokes to the island. We arrive, and come out of the sea triumphant, but the waiting crowd is grim. By discarding our gowns, we have failed the test. There will be no weddings after all.

II.
I have been given a baby to care for, and she is wrapped in a sling across my back, but I have a long journey to make. I am in a world where there are only islands and reefs, with sea between, and as I make my way between them, I wade at first. I wade along reefs where the water is up to my knees, then my waist, and then I reach channels that must be crossed by swimming. And I start to swim, then to dive, swimming underwater like a fish, and it is a consuming thing, like being a mermaid. I swim and tumble and dive, deeper and deeper, going from island to island. And I quite forget about the baby strapped upon my back. I remember, late in the day, and with great horror, I unwrap the sling. But it is too late. The baby has gills, the baby has turned into a green frog, a creature of water. I have failed her.

III.
I am perched upon a cliff in a narrow ravine, thin as paper. My brother Jeff, young again, perhaps only four or five, blonde as can be and thin as a whip, is on the deck of an impossibly thin ship trapped in the ravine. I am anxious, for great swells of water keep crashing down the ravine from the open sea beyond, and the ship is struggling to hold together. Finally she is washed upon the cliff and it is all water and spray and I am crying out for Jeff, screaming and screaming. And finally the waves die down and there is he is, floating facedown in a shallow bay below, so very small. I leap down and wade out and lift him in my arms and run from the next incoming wave. I run up a long tunnel into an abandoned warehouse, where I find a single human being and beg him to call for an ambulance. But it takes so very long to come and although I know he is wounded, perhaps mortally so, the dream is getting boring. So he recovers slightly, and we find some coloured pencils and paper in the drawer of one of the empty desks, and settle down on the floor in the half light and begin to draw.

Unresolved Fears of the Imagination

2007-06-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

I have a longstanding fear of using my imagination as part of my spirituality:
Of conjuring God up,
Of making God in my own image--
As if the Spirit has no place in my imagination,
Has no hope of blowing upon the embers of those fires,
And making something new.

Where does this fear come from?
In my private life, I have long written poems about God using untraditional imagery.

Yet I used to feel that whatever we say publicly about God must be Literal, must just be copies of what the Bible says, word for word, letter for letter--
A literal kind of faith,

A fundamentalist kind of faith.
I was raised on the inerrancy of Scripture. Did that result in this dread of creativity in my soul? This dread that, when named, is the fear of heresy,

which has somehow come to mean the fear of getting things wrong.
Which I have apparently decided is all right in private--God will forgive me, will let me do this sort of unsanctioned imaging in my own house,

but heaven forbid that I throw it upon public waters and lead others astray.

As if I have that kind of power. As if I could be the Antichrist in her bright and gleaming clothing. As if dreams and visions are only things for others, and not for me. I am Only using my imagination.
I am Only making things up about God.
I am Only Pretending.
Yet these Only Pretend Things stir my soul, like that occasional angel stirring the water of the Pool of Silom. And sometimes, when I am Just Pretending, something unexpected happens, wholly beyond my control or intention, as if the Spirit has come along like a Muse and taken over the plot and sent it all wildly spinning. Who knows? Perhaps She or He has.

So why do I fear what I write about God?
Does it matter that I don’t know
if or when it’s just my imagination
or the Spirit that dwells in us?
These are unresolved fears.
I just felt the need to voice them,
as I feel the urge to voice some of these untraditional
pieces I write.
Vox.

As one in a besieged city
Who is this God? Will She save me as one in a beseiged city? Surely She beholds the armies encamped on the plain, the smoke of their cooking fires rising, ringing the walled city, keeping her inhabitants from food and water—starving me, bringing me to my knees with rib-thin hunger and a crazed soul. Will she swarm over their encampments, clear the ramparts in one long-legged leap, seize me in Her sinewy arms and bear me away to safety? Will She send an angel for me, wide of shoulder and pure of heart, with a quiver across his back, cutting a swathe through the beseigers and battling his way to my grateful side? Will She drop parachutes of food and water like the Americans flying over Berlin in World War II, precious floating bundles? Or will She burrow beneath the enemy, travel under the poisoned wells and the scorched earth and rise from below like a mole emerging from a tunnel, earth covered and mossy eyed, and draw me down into the dark and secret realms where the foundations of the world slide along each other's edges and coal becomes glowing diamond? Any way, any guise, as long as She comes, comes for me.

A Pledge Against the Wolf

2007-06-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

Mike has arrived safely in Sudan and my friend is feeling slightly better in Bangkok, though not yet out of the woods. And I am back to my birds-in-old-stuff theme. I wrote this a long time ago--nearly ten years now, when I was living in Chicago. I found the pigeons there emblematic of the Spirit--they could be found everywhere, no matter how dark the alley and how desperate the company. They nested on the far side of our bathroom wall in some sort of abandoned chimney--if you put your ear to the wall you could hear them shuffling and cooing, and I found this comforting.

A Pledge Against the Wolf
I will not strengthen the wolf in me.
I will not feed its slavering jaws
I will not pace in its rough coat
down dark and ungodly places.
I will not dwell in the house of the wicked.
I will not feed the wolf in me.

I will be encircled by wings,
feathered denizens, the motley guardians of my soul—
the Spirit, near and fierce and fearless.
I am surrounded by pigeons
and no alley is too dark for their bright and unblinking eyes.
I call upon the winged creatures of heaven
to surround me, fluttering and fond,
to save me
from that which prowls and seeks to devour.

I will starve the wolf;
I will feed the pigeons
until they are too many to be counted;
until the wolf is thin and weak and to be pitied—
and then, and only then,
the birds will rise,
the air will shake with the beating of their wings and the peal of their cries
and they will carry bread in their beaks
healing in their wings,
and tend the sick creature,
and the wolf will become a tame thing
which loves the light,
and its Maker—
A forgiven creature,
that lies down and sleeps in safety.
Amen. May it be so.
* * *

When I first sent this to a friend, he wrote back and said that matters in his soul were more akin to a pack of weasels. I trust this is no longer the case and I close with Picasso...

Mike Goes Back to Sudan

2007-06-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

Right, I'm through with the anonymous thing. It's a waste of time. As far as I can see, the only people likely to read this blog are you, the various friends I've told, cajoled, and announced the thing's existence to.

Apologies to those strangers who got here by searching "blog Christian bad birder Cambodia spirituality." Of whom I'm sure you are legion.

So this is Lisa speaking, and this post is about Michael, my dear youngest younger brother, who has just headed back to Sudan to work in Darfur. He's probably inhaling the dust of Khartom as we speak, the city named for an elephant's trunk.

Mike is good for my prayer life. As in, he spends so much time in dangerous places that I feel compelled to pray for him often, and this results in me praying often. Convoluted logic, I know. The honest truth? I'm not thrilled that Mike is going to spend a year in Darfur. It frightens me a bit. On the other hand, I believe he will be good at the work and a blessing to everyone he meets there. All life is risk and the people of Darfur worth taking such a risk. So may blessing be on him as he goes, blessing as he stays, and blessing when he leaves again.

I will now attempt to lure you all in to Compelled to Pray world by putting up some pictures to introduce you to or remind you of him. Hmm. Maybe it's good that he won't see these while within Punishment of Evil Sister Striking Range. This was Mike at Christmas brooding on the whereabouts of Moriarty.
This is what possession of a new digital camera does to perfectly sane intelligent people.
This is Mike having a Moment with the tomb guardians of the dead emperors of Hue, Vietnam.
This is us in Cat Ba national park beginning our sea kayaking trip. That makes us sound Really Fit and Daring, doesn't it? And boy, are we tan.
This is sideways. Clearly not yet a master of the digital camera software, ahem. This is Mike on the side of the world in the Plain of Jars on the Bolavan plateau in Laos, leaning against the largest jar of all. These were hewn from stone, rolled an unknown distance, and scattered all over these beautiful green hills. The theory is funerary urns, but the only human remains have been found under the jars, not in them. Had Mike and I one extra day in our itinerary, we could have gone and scaled a mountain and gone to a cave full of ancient people's bones. Which apparently one can sit among and handle to one heart's content. Archaelogical preservation is not high on the priority list of the most heavily bombed province in Laos. In fact, most of the recent work done at the Plain of Jars was done by MAG, demining the place so tourists can walk around it without getting blown up. I can feel myself yearning to start on a long essay about UXOs and the need to ban cluster bombs and the terrible carpet bombing we Americans did to the Laotian people--but I'm holding back. Almost: you can find out more at www.mag.org.uk.

It must be said that I don't think Mike would mind this diversion, since it's victims of war that occupy his days.

Kynom srolan neak,
puon pouv.
Sok sabai tam plau.

Sunday Bird Photo-Op

2007-06-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Mum took this brilliant shot of a beautiful bird of prey. I post it in honor of the Windhover poem I have No Idea what kind of bird of prey it is. Anyone is welcome to let me know.

Doesn't this mute swan look lovely? Distractingly lovely? So lovely you might want stroke her feathery white wings and snap!! ahhh!

Prayers for a Friend

2007-06-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

I just found out that the woman of this lovely house I have been describing, a dear friend and a new mother, has been evacuated to Bangkok because she has contracted dengue fever. Her white blood cell count is very low, and her husband is trying to take care of her and the baby. I would ask that those of who you pray remember them both.

Thank you

Notes on a Place I Love

2007-06-02T06:22:00.000-07:00

I went looking for my stuff on Mechthilde and found that the last time I'd written about her was in Mondulkiri, in northern Cambodia. I love Mondulkiri. I am hoping to do my fieldwork there when I become a real anthropologist...

And I started reading these short impressionistic pieces I'd jotted down about Mondukiri and started missing it fiercely. So here they are:

Christmas Day 2004
In a pioneer town. Golden morning light, wind howling between plank walls, the whine of electric saws, the road out of town boiling with red dust--Sen Monorom, Mondulkiri, on Christmas morning.

I dream a crowd of rough white men seek entrance to the house while my friends are away. I wake to find two utility vehicles loaded with guns parked at the guesthouse beside us. Their wealthy Asian owners shoot rifles at targets just a few metres from the workmen with their saws in the lot below. Semi-automatic weapons are piled in one vehicle. They drive away en masse--to hunt the endangered animals of the highlands? To hunt Montagnards creeping across the border to seek safe haven and to flee their troubled ancestral lands? Either way, something violent and terrible. At night they are loud and drunken, their laughter invading our quiet space. We would gladly see these men away, back to wherever they came from.

The red dust settles everywhere, even on the cashew trees with their broad spatulate leaves. The wind blows the earth over the landscape; the world is daubed with ochre, the sky full of pale light. The burned hills are black, then brights where the young grass has sprouted. The light is thin in this high place. My friend strums his classical guitar and wind whistles and weeps. The shell discs of the mobile by the window ring faintly as small tendrils of wind work their way through cracks in the wooden walls.

Generators throb
a woman washes clothes by hand in a basin
a cat curls beside me
the stilt-high house rocks gently under the wind's pushing hands.

I am reading early Hemmingway, A Moveable Feast:
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

* * *

The last time I was in Mondulkiri, in 2006, I wrote very little because I spent the greater part of every day birding in a "nice patch of wilderness" with my friends' dog Lucas. Lucas is a large lovely black Labrador and he is a bona fide non-human member of the BBC, as he is a bad birder. Well, he's good at finding birds, but not so good at keeping his distance. So birding with Lucas was more a matter of flushing birds and watching them flap frantically into the distance. Due to his presence, I saw, rapidly receding from view, a number of rare birds that normally skulk and never show themselves, like a Germain's peacock pheasant. I think. These rare birds, once flushed, weren't too pleased with either Lucas or I and refused to give us a second chance at sneaking up on them. I am, by the way, Lucas' best non-familial friend Ever. When I get back to Mondulkiri he's going to smell my hand and start leaping up and down going, Hurrah, the human willing to spend hours and hours charging through the woods, hurrah! You've got to love dogs.

My heart stirred for a bird

2007-06-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my friend Nurina the other night, who was telling me about Sufis and the various symbolic birds of the soul--I think... We were at a pub. It was kind of loud. And I said that I had a Christian blog about birds. And she asked me if I was dealing with birds on a symbolic level, and I said, no, I just like birds. I'm a green christian. But then I remembered the German mystic Mechthilde of Magdeburg and told Nurina about her--I'll return to her in my next post. And then, once I had started thinking about it, I realized that birds have cropped up as symbols of the Spirit and the human spirit in my writing and in my prayers for 10 years. And I've only gotten interested in the real feathered material creatures in the last two years. As if this love in me had been lying dormant, occasionally waving a wing around, waiting for me to discover it and set it free.

So I've been looking at my old things and finding the birds. And thinking of other Christians' use of birds in their writing, writing I've already read. I haven't gone looking for anything new, as that would be like just openly admitting that I'm never ever going to get my dissertation written... At any rate, I thought I'd post some pieces in June on this theme. If you are a lover of English poetry, you might have already realized that the title of this post is stolen from the luminous Gerald Manley Hopkins. This poem is from 1918, and it was in an online collection, www.bartleby.com, so I have decided to place it here without guilt. I like to read Hopkins' work aloud, in one-long-breathless-breath. And the lovely bird art is by the extraordinary Sandy Arensen. Asante, msanii...

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

A Gang of Geese

2007-05-30T03:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday it sounded like I adore every living creature on earth. I wish that were true. But, truth be told, I am scared of geese. And swans.

Why, you wonder, would a bird-lover be afraid of swans and geese? Well, they’re strong and smart and territorial and aggressive. Like dogs. Like attack dogs with wings and beaks.

I once spent a week with a friend in a wonderful wooden house on stilts in Ratanakiri, in northern Cambodia. Directly across the road from her front gate lived a gang of geese. I don’t know who picked the word ‘flock’ for geese. Please. We’re talking a Gang of Geese. A Mafia of Geese, really. Whatever organized crime goes down in Ratanakiri, I’m sure those geese have a wing in. They’re probably organizing the poaching of their rarer avian relatives in the forest, just to strengthen their control of the town. Geese clearly fall in my unbiased BBC (Bad Birders of Cambodia, remember?) category of Ruffian Birds.

At any rate, whenever I set foot out of the gate onto the red earthen road, the Gang would hiss and flip their insolent wings and deliberately obstruct my path. I ended up edging along the margin of the road in the mud and, occasionally, running away from a leg-threatening experience. What I needed was a golf umbrella, one of those huge umbrellas with a spike on it. With one of those you’d have flapping action and stabbing action, like God gave the goose in the first place, and consequent goose-human confrontations might be a fairer fight. Or the threat of goose-liver pate. Maybe just a tin would do it. You could hold it out as you edged out the gate and say, You really want a piece of this? My kind consumes your kind’s liver. Back, foul birds, back!

Yes, there is cowardice and malice in my soul. Still, geese are scary. And I think swans are like big white or black geese with longer necks. So when everyone else is scattering bread at their feet for the lovely creatures, I’m keeping a 10 foot perimeter and showing empty hands. That’s all I have to say about this.

Chance of Kingfishers

2007-05-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

I get shy around real birders, being a member only of the Bad Birders of Cambodia, which has three proud members, plus a shy Khmer kid who likes birds and hasn’t yet been informed that we’re roping in him to our weird foreign hobby. Bad Birders is going to be hard to translate—it would literally translate as Evil Bird-Searchers and will probably have to be glossed as People Who Aren’t Very Good at Finding Birds But Want To Look at Them, which isn’t going to be anywhere near as cool on the T-shirts. But sometimes I get on the website of the Birding Society of Edinburgh, which advertises Events. These events are walks or sometimes a drive and then a walk, to where the birds live. The descriptions of these events are shockingly tender, even in their brevity. Here is one: Walk by the Waters of Leith. Chance of kingfishers.

How do I say this? A birder is the kind of person I want to be. The kind of person who lives in anticipation, in hope, who will take a long walk over rough terrain for the chance of kingfishers. I want to be like my friend Janet’s new husband, who knows each tree by name. To know each tree. To know each bird. To know every creature in the sea and how its waters rise and fall. To me such knowledge is a kind of tenderness, almost a kind of holiness.

Our great and terrible neglect, the damage we have done and keep doing to our world, the world I believe we are meant to treasure and protect, staggers me. The lists of the dead break my heart. It would be easiest to turn away from it all and pin my hopes on an apocalyptic Christianity that consigns all this marvellous materiality to fire. But to me that seems like sin. It seems to me what is required is a fierce hope and a strong will and, if all else fails, the promise to bear witness. To say, no matter what befalls us, I will learn each bird by name. I will watch for them. And even if the seas rise and the sky burns and the forests fall and the deserts spread and their bright brief lives flicker and go out one by one, I will mourn them. Name by lovely name.

Anthropologist

2007-05-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

So friends--
I made my decision,
signed the papers,
picked one longing over another, at least for a time.
I will be doing a PhD in social anthropology.

What does this mean? Well, one thing it means is that I'll stay on in Edinburgh for another year come September, learning to structure a long term ethnographic research project and freezing to death. Another thing it means is that I'll go to Mondulkiri in the Cambodian highlands for a year and a half and immerse myself in other people's lives and then try to translate that into writing. Which isn't that different a task from the tasks I set myself in my writing at the moment.

Not that it isn't different. It's really different. I need to learn to be logical, for one thing. As in, structure a logical argument. Analyze abstractions. Critique and be critiqued. Terrifying.

More concretely, it means that I am giving up this sort of writing for a season:
I swallowed the Nile to celebrate the day of my birth. Not all of it, of course. But enough, enough to carry the smell of papyrus and the churning of the dark blue water and the gaping yawn of the hippo and the quick stabbing thrust of the African darter that spears fish upon its beak in my belly for a long time hence. If I sway slightly when I walk; if my head rolls like a wave; if I open up my mouth and spew forth water instead of words; forgive me, for I have been baptized in churning white water and have forgotten my name. Ask the river gods of the Egyptians; the hippo-headed god; the crocodile god; ask the steel grey goliath heron standing motionless in the shallows, watching the whimsy of men. I woke the morning after to find three shallow gouges in my flesh where something or someone clawed my arm. I drank the Nile and the Nile drank some of my blood in return. I have been humbled by the power of her waters—I have remembered that I am but a mere mortal tumbling headlong in the vast and churning world.

for this sort:
According to Augee, one of the conditions of hypermodernity is that homogeneity and individuation occur simultaneously.

Is this some sort of Faustian bargain? I certainly hope not. I have been told that I cannot do both creative writing and academic writing at the same time. I hope to rebel. Just a bit. Just enough to build little straw houses of creative writing beside the great ivory tower I have agreed to help build for a season. Little straw houses to keep the wolves at bay. No huffing and puffing will blow my houses down; not if I have anything to say in the matter.

There is a time for everything, the writer of Ecclesiastes said. Why do I always yearn to have everything all at the same time? Greed, I guess.

In other news: I saw my first tufted ducks. Black with grey-blue bills and yellow eyes, otherworldly creatures. And the solitary herons, nesting in a tree and fighting with sea gulls. It's a wild world, praise be.

The Forgotten Land

2007-05-24T04:37:00.000-07:00

I am not around much as of late, in more ways than one. I have just had a dear friend visit for 3 days, enough time to process all of the joys and sorrows since we parted nearly two years ago in Phnom Penh. Enough time to catch up, but it's still a sharp sorrow that she is not part of my Everyday. And tomorrow I will take a bus to visit another dear friend. My parents' visits and now these times with old friends has been rather like awakening--since my grandmother's death I have been slipping softly into solitude, finding my own company simpler than that of new friends. My own company and worlds of narrative--books or films. I tend to let myself grieve however I need to grieve. But it does trouble me that I am so disinclined to meditate and pray as of late--so I went back and found this poem this morning.

The Forgotten Land
We do not have to discover the world of faith;
we only have to recover it. It is not a terra incognita,
an unknown land; it is a forgotten land. Rabbi Heschel

A forgotten land, where once I dwelled,
like the world I walk in dreams,
vast and wild, with high seas
and steep cliffs, where I am often
running but occasionally fly. To
recover faith, like a ring lost in a
pocket, like a baby wrapped in too
much swaddling cloth---unwind her
layer by layer by layer, she is not
unknown, she is loved and dear,
but you have somehow forgotten her face.
Recover the terrain, take the maps, the
compass, set out on foot, under the stars,
under the meteors burning in the galaxy
we will never reach until our bodies
turn to light and God
whistles us home.

The Murle did not believe in
heaven, or at least not for humans.
Humans passed on to live in caves
beneath the earth, one-eyed, one-handed,
tending tiny herds of cattle. Recover the
terrain—their faith is in cattle. Is mine in
chariots, in horses? God calls us
to throw down that which we love and go
empty handed into the wilderness,
the forgotten land.

Sighting

2007-05-18T06:55:00.000-07:00

When I first read and marvelled at Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, its structure was one of the things that impressed me. I was in awe of those little imagistic 'Weather Reports' woven around the long essays. I remember their content still, much more clearly than the longer pieces. When I started building the scaffolding of my Cambodia memoir I shamelessly copied her style, hoping to intersperse longer essays with short Sightings. I might still do that. But until then, I thought I'd adopt it for this medium. Sightings are just that: things glimpsed, seen, stumbled over, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with perfect clarity.

Sighting

An old Indian man, cane tucked beneath one arm, is throwing bread for the pigeons over a railing into a small park on Nicholson Street in Edinburgh. A lot of urban dwellers despise pigeons, but this man is feeding them a whole bag of bread. The birds mill about in a grey mob in the grass beyond the railing, their pink and turquoise neck patches shimmering. By the man's feet, on a low stone wall on our side of the railing, lies a dead pigeon. Its feathers are dull and matted. The man stands beside the dead bird and feeds the live ones. His expression is grave. It is serious work, this casting of bread for birds. I leave him to it and pass on by.

Speaking of Angels

2007-05-15T03:48:00.000-07:00

Comparing puffins to angels made me remember this old poem of mine.

The people are like trees
Mark 9

I have a
secret. There was
a man once,
who took my
hand and led
me away from
the clamor of
voices and the press
of bodies. I heard
them fading, felt
them passing—I
was blind then,
blind from splinters
of rock in the
quarry, but
that story
is finished
now. I am
telling you a
secret, how a
man with calloused
hands, workman's
hands, hands
a man could
trust, took me
away to a quiet
place and spat
and laid those
hands upon my
scarred eyes, and
I saw something
beautiful, I saw
people like
trees walking,
long and thin
and leaning, like
tall and reedy
angels, the world
stretched long
and wavering,
and I heard
laughter in that
workman's voice,
that carpenter
turned teacher, and
he touched my
eyes again
and the normal
world returned,
that safe and
sane place
I used to
know, and
he smiled at
me and told
me where
I must not go—
I understood
he was shy
about the
power in his
rough hands.
I hear things
sometimes about
him still—wonder
worker, prophet—
the Romans
crucified him, you
know, put
nails through
his hands, the
hands that rested
on my eyes
for a brief
moment. It
was quiet
where he
took me, and
I think he gave
me something
with his spit
and hands.
The first time,
when all the
people
were like
trees, I
saw that
they were
holy, and
I think he
always
saw things
that way,
like an angel,
maybe, and
not a man, and
that's the
most
beautiful
thing that's
ever happened
to me, being
taken by
his hand
and given
sight. I
see clearly
now, but I
want to
whisper to
you that the
people, the
people are
still like
trees, like
angels, bending
in the wind of the
world, and I
love them
all.

Miracles...Part II

2007-05-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

II.
All this talk of noticing miracles reminded me of why I started birding in the first place--to learn to see again, to pay attention to the extraordinary world around us, a world that is passing away because of our carelessness and violent indifference. Birding usually requires a lot of patience, attention, and luck. Time spent with the bird book. Time spent staring at the bushes with your binoculars, then without them, then with them again, trying to find the winged creature making all the noise. Some days it's as if there are no birds left in the world. Some days, as Melissa would put it, it's all just yellowbums (a very common kind of bulbul). And then, sometimes, out of nowhere, darting past, comes someone extraordinary, fixing you with a dazzling eye.
My encounter with puffins wasn't like that at all. It was absurdly easy. It required, first of all, a voyage across the open sea, for which I drugged myself, to an island made of honey-combed basalt pillars called Staffa. There were small wonders on the way--fat sleeping seals, wheeling shearwaters (like a brown seagull), and lots of auks way out in the waves--guillemots and razorbills and puffins--exciting black and white birds, all of them, but very distant indeed. Patrick, the boat guy, told us that if we just climbed to the top of the island and walked to the cliffs on the far side, and sat down at the edge of the cliffs, and just waited, that the puffins would come in from their rafts on the sea. (Raft here means 'clump of birds.') They would feel safe from the seagulls and come right up to us and be friendly and access their cliff burrows. I confess that although I hoped this were true, I didn't fully believe it. So my father and I hiked across the cliffs with one other family. We got to the edge of a cliff on a green hill above the sea. Down below us were some fulmars tucked up sleeping on the ledges of rock that they use as nests. We weren't sure whether this was the right cliff. The puffins were out in their raft, wee dots on the water. They seemed perfectly indifferent to us. I decided to test my faith in this matter, spread my coat on the green grass, about a metre back from the edge, sat down and waited. Dad scaled the next hill to see if the puffins would come to that point instead. I sat by myself on the green hill and waited. After a while some of the puffins started lifting out of the water and flying around in ever increasing circles. This went on for some time. Yet they appeared to be about to fly out to sea, and I remember feeling very sad about this. Then they changed direction. They started flying in large arcs, getting closer to us on each pass. Toying with us, perhaps, or thinking they were clever little puffins fooling the seagull ruffians. Then, abruptly, they fluttered down out the sky all along the cliff's edge. Right in front of me. Orange feet first, wings up and behind, landing with a bit of a thump. And then all these wonderful little birds looked oddly at you and went about their bird business. It was absurd and wonderful. All I had to do was sit there and be surrounded by puffins, by a crowd of whimsical affectionate many-colored little angels. My eyes were open--I saw, and I marvelled. I still do.

Miracles and the Advent of Puffins, Part I

2007-05-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

I. A history professor spoke at my church yesterday. Her name is Shannon, and she talked about miracles and about learning to recognize miracles--to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. One of her texts was the story in John's gospel of the chronically ill man who lay by the Pool of Siloam but could never make it into the water when the angel stirred it. Jesus turns up, and, incongruously, asks the man if he wishes to be well. When the man indicates that he would indeed like to be well, but just can't quite manage the rush to the holy water, Jesus simply tells him to get up. And he finds he can, although he doesn't even know who Jesus is. It's a miracle, but you could have missed it, had you been there by the Pool of Siloam, waiting for some shiny angel to stir up the water.

I think what Shannon was trying to do was to get our motley congregation to pay more attention to the presence of God. To the extraordinary in the ordinary, as she put it. It was a good reminder for me--I who often long for angels on the threshing floor, like Gideon, for someone to wrestle with and give strange blessings, like Jacob. Instead, how often is the miraculous like the angels who turn up dusty and hungry at Moses' tent? Unnoticed, unless we have open eyes and ears to hear.

And again, African style

2007-05-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

a few more feathered examples...

ruffians

prey
She just sort of snuck in. This is the elephant's closest relative? Kweli? My friend Laura wants to be a hyrax; but cannot choose between the rock habitat or the tree habitat. Academic life gives itself to these sorts of musings. Clearly, something is amiss.

Ruffians and Pirates--on taking sides

2007-05-09T05:25:00.000-07:00

So it seems that I am not on my way to becoming a National Geographic photographer. It is not a viable fallback career. I blame my fabulous new digital camera, which I can't operate very well. Yet, let's say. So nearly all the bird pictures I will be posting in the next few days were taken by my father, who does not need a fallback career.

I want to discuss gulls. I think of sea gulls as the ruffians of the ocean world. Scavengers, fishermen, and predators of the wee darling that are puffins. Puffins are Small. Way smaller than I thought they were. They are only threatening to little eel fish, whom they stack up in their bills with sawteeth edges so nobody can fall out. Sea gulls are Way Scary to puffins. There's this hierarchy of predators in the seabird world just like in every other environment. Puffins are largely prey. Sea gulls are ruffians. Skuas are the pirates. As the Collins guide says, they obtain most of their food through piracy. This raises some interesting visuals, unless you're wondering what the heck a skua is. Think big gull-like bird with eagle-beak. Piracy in the seabird world means you come winging up hard and mean on a less aggressive bird, like a gannet, which gets so afraid it throws up all the food it was storing in its gullet in order to get away. The gullet is like the purse you might throw at a nasty mugger in a dark alley, only it's full of delicious fishy things.

True birders don't take sides in these matters. Everybody eats somebody and we humans are the worst culprits of all. I am not a true birder--I'd take a clumsy engaging wee puffin over a gull or a skua anyday. Maybe when Isaiah's prophecy comes to pass, we'll all be eating grass. Who knows? For now, we're skuas. Or gulls. I feel more akin to a gull than a skua--more of an opportunist than a dedicated predator. So I'm posting some mug shots. This herring gull was willing to put up with a photo shoot in the hopes of scraps. Villain.

A scrap of song from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' song Cannibal's Hymn comes to mind:

If you're going to dine with them cannibals,

sooner or later, darling,

you're going to get eaten.

Watch out for them cannibals, friends.

God in the heart

2007-05-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

The holidays are over, I must make a decision which will greatly affect the course of my life, and I am still preparing a suitable presentation to describe the heart-stopping wonder of encountering puffins. So here is a theo-poem from my past--if it offends, I suppose you will know better than to read any others that I post! My spirituality is topsy-turvy at best, but as honest as I can manage--and I trust that this is sufficient for Grace.

A very quick note for those of you who don't already know this--I call God He or She as the mood suits, or a variety of other names--you may find this startling, but I think that's the point, and for the record, I do mean the Christian God, the Triune One. Onwards.

It's called:

God in the Heart
'The heart that breaks open stays open.'
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

And God climbs in, nimble-foot,
lithe, and perches – frog
in a well, canary in a mine,
purring like a pigeon – see
the beating of my God-filled
heart beneath my curving
ribs, see God the grain of
sand tumbling in the oyster
soul, O that She were shiny
and smooth rather than an
arrow in my chest, a sword
in my side. To be unaware
and at peace, but this thorny
God pricks like a bramble,
burrows like a mole, knells
like a bell, delves deep –
has no one told Her there are
no diamonds here? It is
untoward: gods should be
clean, not coated in coal
dust; gods should not
weep, gods should be stern, quick to
punish, quick to judge. God
should fix the
world rather
than mucking
about with
the likes of me,
but I cannot
dislodge Her,
cannot pry Her
fingers free,
I have a God-
infested heart,
God is the
hive of bees in the
belly of Samson’s
lion, wild and sad
and strange, making
me hum.

Big Bird

2007-04-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

In case you miss me while I'm away, here is a photo of a large flightless bird. This is my mother's photograph, which I have shamelessly poached for your viewing pleasure.

Going With Sloth

2007-04-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

So there's this little snippet of dialogue from Serenity that I'd like to borrow (Serenity, the film based on the wonderful show Firefly, that my friend Ramon recently introduced me to):

Scary bad guy with sword: Do you know what your sin is?
Mal, the hero: Hell, I'm a fan of all seven but today I'll have to go with wrath!

And I'll have to go with sloth.
Sloth is the sort of word you can just curl up in and go to sleep. Not a deep sleep, but that sort of restless dreaming that goes on when you know you should be up and active but are hiding out instead. Huddled up in the warm lair of sloth.

But I have conquered that sleepy sin for now and as of three o'clock tomorrow, will have written and submitted three essays, and earned a holiday in the Hebrides.

Happy me. I will return in two weeks' time with stories and pictures of birds.

the world filled with birds

2007-04-21T04:42:00.000-07:00

I took the long way to the university this morning so I could walk along Blackett Avenue. For some birds are mad about this avenue. I am new to this matter of birding. My father knew the secret long before I did. I still remember the day I first realized that his vision was different then mine.

I was home from boarding school in Kenya, only we weren’t home, rather we were living in tents in Loita Hills with a host of new missionaries to whom my parents were attempting to teach the ropes of living in the bush. Early one morning he led a walk for birds, and I went along.

Awake before the sun, screeching and singing,
The birds tussled over fruit in the trees.
Moving in the gray light like sleepwalkers,
we straggled behind my father,
bored by the multitudes:
crowds of birds clustered in the trees,
fluttering through the brush at our approach.
Blearily I watched my father
his darting glances,
nods, whispers,
Then the field glasses were pressed into my hands.
I raised them to my eyes;
the indistinguishable grey masses faded.
My eyes ignited—
explosions of color,
crests, feathers, rills, beaks, gleaming wings
filled my vision.

And I understood—my father sees the world filled with birds.
And now I do too. Praise be.

bones of saints

2007-04-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

Today is not a good day. It's mid-afternoon and I have accomplished little today. I am trying to write about the commodification of the body. I feel sure that material on medieval relics (the bones of saints), rumors of body-snatching, the global organ trade, and the free market where all the world's for sale all fits together somehow in a brilliant essay. I just don't know that I'm the woman to write it.

It's spring and there are orchids and otters and birds waiting for me on the Western Isles, puffins and others with evocative names like divers and guillemots and shearwaters and snow buntings.

So let me go back to Easter Sunday. I had a good Easter. I didn't work at all. My lovely Scottish Episcopal church was all yellow and green and full of leaves. We were all herded into the back hallway and then we followed women with spices, like the women who went to anoint Christ's body that long ago day, and walked into sunlight and glory. We've had this huge crown of thorns hanging above the altar in the middle of the room all through Lent, twisted reeds with barbed wire wrapped round it, and that morn it was wreathed with branches and flowers like a May Day crown. Satin streamers stretched from it to all the corners of the room over our heads, Christ and spring and resurrection all mingled--fragrant, intertwined and alive.

And we had an Easter ceilidh that night, a kind of Scottish dancing that gave birth to square dancing in America. All generations danced together, and a wee girl I'll call Anna, who has a language comprehension condition and normally only speaks to her family and never to me, despite my longstanding attempts to win her over, came up to me and my two companions and sat on our laps and chattered and played with little pipe-cleaner Easter chicks. It was somewhat violent play, which I blame entirely on the child--we made them jump the plank and fight like roosters and flattened them with our fists and made them eat shortbread until they burst. And then she danced the Virginia Reel with me and I think that was about as much resurrection as anyone can ask for.

Welcome, but you have been warned

2007-04-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to keep a web-journal for a while. I wanted it to be a paean to birding and how it has revived my spirituality. But I haven't been birding much lately, and I still have some spirituality, and I suspect the birding-communing with God connection might be a wee bit esoteric for many, even those who know and love me.

I am still planning to say rather a lot about birds. You have been warned. But I also wanted a place to also post new and old thoughts and musings and poemish things about God and liturgy and Christian spirituality. Feel free to copy down and use any of them however you wish. And I'm going to be irreverent at times as well, and angry and sad and occasionally downright despairing. Again, you have been warned. And occasionally I might tell strange and riotous stories, like those from my first year of college, a keen young missionary's child fresh out of East Africa--running through the woods with a squirrel collar while a reluctant crowd of American college students tracked me, that sort of thing.

I make no promises to write every day, every week—but I will write when there’s time enough and things to say. And when I get a chance I will post a host of poems and musing from the manuscript of prayers I have.

By the way, in case you don't know, I am in Scotland, in Edinburgh, living at the foot of Arthur's Seat and studying on a cobbled street in George Square. This is my life this year:

flannel sheets curry from the back of the Mosque woolly sweaters bedroom slippers magpies double-decker buses berries libraries goat’s milk yogurt the tracery of branches on leafless trees distracted sheep slate seas old stone houses long red hair

And the question of the day, nay, the year, is this:
Why am I in grad school when I could be pretending to save the world?

The answer, improbably, lies somewhere near these words of Michel Foucault:

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

[That's probably illegal. Is it illegal to quote people on the Internet? I need a former student, wise in the ways of the world, to inform me...]

At any rate, I am back in school after a long time out of it. And I have sunk beneath the weight of too many words, my eyes grown worse—words used in argument, as means to an end, with little attention to their own peculiar aesthetic or to their power to move more than the mind…

So just in case
Your lives, like mine,
Through necessity or bare neglect,
Give short shrift
Of late
To poetry:

a few words from T.S. Eliot:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.

[Again with the need for a wise student.]

Be well on your various explorations!