August: Processing/Reflecting part I

So here I am. Peace and Plenty. Computer in hand. Without a time limit or a pressing schedule or people to meet or things to do. Just here. And for that I thank you. It’s like the sweetness of milk after years of dry dust, like the moment of rest for the soul that has never ceased to be in rush. My praying legs are shaky and my reading eyes faulty, my sensing soul is weak and my feelings numb and crawling for life.

Jesus, it has been too long. And I was in denial about this, that this culture shock is real, and when I didn’t feel it after a month, I thought I had outwitted it, kicked it in the tail, that I was stronger than that. But that reality is not fact. I’m weak, just like the next one, and the struggle is real and has hit me to the point that I would become numb if I didn’t take time to process and think, time to be alone and realize how I’m different.

I don’t want to walk away from this experience unchanged. I want to take it all in, to see all that I saw and allow it to wash over me and expose that which has been hidden under the dirt my past has caked me with.

Literally around the world and back, this has been a sweet yet incredibly hard time. Feeling like I’ve slid backwards, squandered an opportunity to grow and see a fuller life. But it was so hard. First the whole working thing where I was only on campus select few days and working and living with judy. It was hard to readjust to the things that I saw, the people that began to drift away and the things I never had the chance to say. It was a challenge to be an outsider, working in the real world, not knowing how to relate to my coworkers who talk about blow jobs and drinking like Olivetians do Jesus and God. How do I love these people? How do I relate? How do I remind myself of the truths that they crudely mock every day? I can’t imitate what I’ve seen because it isn’t relevant to the scene. The intimation of how ridiculous Christian looks weighs down on me like a millstone tied around my neck. My empathy drags me down if there’s no one there to remind me of what I know to be the truth. And that exposure was just the beginning.

Then from beggars I went to the Appalachian trail.  A whole subculture in itself. A world secluded from everyone else. A place where those who are lost seek to be found, those with no plan begin building themselves from the ground up, seeking adventures and pushing themselves to see what their bodies can stand up against. These people bond together over doing this trail, closer than brothers they walk from sun up till sundown. Carrying everything they currently own on their backs they invent a new life for this time, name and all, and enjoy this surreal world out of the reach of time. I didn’t meet a single Christian, but people were searching. What exactly they hoped to find, I’m not sure, but when they bad-talk Christians I found it hard to find my tongue, because on many things, I happened to agree. But I’m afraid I wasted many chances to say something full of grace. I didn’t know what to do, if it’d be better to stay quiet or to speak out even though I don’t really have a clue how to share something that I spend a lot of my time convincing myself that it is true.

And with my brother and the others, it was hard to stand my ground. That sense of adventure and aimless wandering, being a vagabond without a home kind of appeals to me, yet in a way I find it very pointless and empty. But does everything have to have a point? Some of them seem so happy doing that with their lives, wandering the trail in solidarity.

While I enjoyed the hike, mostly because the government shut down and we were playing cat and mice, I don’t think I would love to spend days on weeks on months hiking the trails. I’m glad I did and I’d do it again, but unless with the right people, I think I would resent it in the end.

I learned about community, about bonding, about solidarity. About taking life as it comes and enjoying things as they are, about getting lost in nature and allowing it to mark you with it’s beauty and depth. I learned about survival and corruption, about the importance of a foods texture. I saw how quickly people in those situations open up and seek to fit together, but not as they were in the real world, but as the pieces that make up the puzzle of the wilderness: whoever they want to be or become.