still processing...

One of the benefits I'm finding to East to West travel is that you naturally wake up early. Bobby had a 6:00 meeting this morning, so after he left I found some quiet time to read my Bible, pray, and just think.

Outside my window, tree frogs, crickets, and birds are the loudest sounds I hear. Morning light is shifting through greens like a girl trying on dresses. Faintly, I smell rain, wet earth, and grass. I feel calmed, pulled back into a seasonal rhythm that centers and restores. There's a sensory mercy in this natural beauty. A grace of God. A hymn written by my Creator. Healing, restful, instructive. A masterpiece tucked full with parables, lessons, reminders. I took this all for granted before our trip... that I wake each morning in a classroom... in a sanctuary.

Amid the luxury of this Created world, flashbacks of crowded, urban Asia cause a pain in my chest. It hurts to remember mile after mile after mile of density. Concrete. Pollution. Crowds. Choking man-made everything. Man-made, brown, thick air. Man-made places for my feet to walk. Man-made mountain buildings. Man-made subway caves. The smell and heat and taste of human effort suffocating almost every reminder of Divinity. A caged, grey world, for millions and millions of people -- the scope of their everything from birth to death.

I've heard so many criticisms about the oppression and suffering in China. But the one I felt most intensely - the one I still can't shake - is its urban density.

My morning grace is full of shifting greens. Twelve hours away, all greys shift to black. It makes me grateful. It makes me sad. It makes my hands feel very small.

-from Wendell Berry's _A Timbered Choir_

Here where the world is being made,

No human hand required,

A man may come, somewhat afraid

Always, and somewhat tired,

For he comes ignorant and alone

From work and worry of

A human place, in soul and bone

The ache of human love.

He may come and be still, not go

Toward any chosen aim

Or stay for what he thinks is so.

Setting aside his claim

On all things fallen in his plight,

his mind may move with the leaves,

Wind-shaken, in and out of light,

And live as the light lives,

And live as the Creation sings

In covert, two clear notes,

And waits; then two clear answerings

Come from more distant throats--

May live a while with light, shaking

In high leaves, or delayed

In halts of song, submit to making,

The shape of what is made.