Retrospective 3: Silence in Mondulkiri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.