I've been trekking a bit, and though there are no outrageous stories (besides the one where, a poisonous black woolly caterpillar somehow got stuck inside my pants and i sat on it and was maliciously BIT), there are some pictures. we've been to a few different waterfalls. One is 10 minutes from my home, the other, 2 hours. what is it about waterfalls that attracts us? i think the most wondrous part for me is the mystery of it. for example, a park ranger could spend plenty of breath explaining 'water sheds' and drainage patterns and the shape of the globe, but i'll always still want to ask "Where does all that water come from?"







I tried to get the pup to sit for a photo shoot and look at the camera (in a very rare moment of acquiescing to requests of photos of puppy&me), but as usual, she preferred to lick my face. and the bunny... why would you NOT want to have such cute, rotund wisps of fluff be the ones to jump-start your biodegrading? this lil one, while alive, helped my 'hot compost' and grass-mowing.

glass to sand

the following statement should be as shocking as it seems:
i watched my friend get hit by a car tonight.
now, i lay in bed replaying the moment; and it becomes more and more frightening as the realization of what happened sinks in.

we set out from our housing complex around 17.30, walking in the direction of Bukit Carmel Orphanage. around this time of the evening, the atmosphere is slowly transforming the afternoon into a golden-warm sunset. a few nimbus clouds gathered dryly high overhead, sparking a conversation about how the rainy season is almost over.
Three were walking: Chrissie, (my neighbor, colleague, and dear friend - soon also to be the star of our movie documenting the advantages of squatting in her driveway all day), Chrissie's friend from home (today is her first day visiting Indonesia), and myself (puppy in tow). We three were chatting away, cheeks rosy for the exercise, savoring the fresh, fresh air, and at times commenting on the speed and nearness of the many cars and ojeks (motorbike taxis) passing us on the road. There is no sidewalk. (duh) but the road is more than wide enough for three white girls, a puppy, and a few cars. its four lanes don't ever really hold more than one intermittent lane of traffic flow, but there are no speed limits. (the grade of the hill limits the speed of the cars and motorbikes.)
I was walking in the median, to allow my seriously-emotionally-fragile dog to cower in the grass when big cars passed. Chrissie and her friend were walking just inside the paved lane, allowing for more than a normal lanes-width of space for a car to pass them on the left hand side. We walked with the traffic.
We were halfway through our tranquil walk, giggling and exclaming over some oddity of international travel and life, when the bushes started becoming more bushy on my right hand side, leaving less space for walking in the median. This may have been why the other two girls were a few paces into the road, i don't remember. I don't even remember if they were any farther in the road than the way that we normally walk.
What i do distinctly remember is an unexplainable urge to look up and over at them, and in a split seconds' time my mind registering this: A large car was driving toward us very fast. It was in a direct line with Chissie's back. It wasn't altering it's course.
I fought through a mili-second of numb, dumb, fearful disbelief before some deep guttural impulse opened my mouth to yell. I don't even know what i yelled, and i can't imagine how i was able to - because in my nightmares i always get stuck in that silent mili-second of fear and am never able to prevent the catastrophe.

But this time the scream was loosed, and it made Chrissie move over - just enough that the only part of the car that hit her was the side-view mirror. I heard a deafening 'CRACK!' and stopped cold, expecting to see Chrissie's body flying through the air, or half of her body splayed out on the ground, or the car spinning figure-eights. Instead, I watched the car finally slow and halt, grinding through shattered glass on the concrete; and Chrissie turned a puzzled face toward me.
Still not believing that she could be ok, i prepared my mind's eye to see a mangled arm and back when Chrissie turned around. But all she did was shake her arm and ask 'what happened?'
The driver slowly reversed toward us, grinding again through the glass-turned-sand on the pavement, and we quickly tried to guess whether or not they might make us pay for the broken mirror that was now dangling from the side of their car. Regardless of our decision, we three were too shocked to really move or start walking away, and i kept thinking i'd have to catch Chrissie when she fainted from internal wounds or shock.
But she didn't faint, she was fine - though the welt tomorrow will be telling, I'm sure. The driver was apologetic, and actually spoke English, and I did my best to convey an incredulous expression of 'you've got to be kidding me! you're the only one on the road, and you hit us?' The only thing I could think of to say in the moment was 'hati-hati' which means 'be careful'. the little word seemed amazingly inept to communicate all that i wanted to say.

the car drove off and we continued walking. the last i saw chrissie tonight, her arm and hand were bright red. i clearly hear her matter-of-fact voice saying "you can just never let down your guard". well, there you have it. from a girl who was just hit by a car, some good, sound advice. you can just never let down your guard in indonesian traffic.

i love that girl. thank you Jesus for sparing her life!

bugs

i've been gardening in the jungle. the jungle in my backyard.
apparently, since it's like always warm here and there is no winter season, all the bugs have had a chance to adapt and mutate and develop defense mechanisms which enable them to prolong life indefinitely.

which means, i must protect myself from very old, very poisonous bugs in my knee-high grass.

and that's difficult to do when you must clip the grass blade-by-blade with hand scissors. (no, really, that's how jungle grass is cut. I'm thinking, though, that I might prefer a machete.)

ya, so, a bug got me yesterday, and now i have a very itchy, very swollen left foot.

I vividly and desperately scare myself sometimes. Usually I try to avoid it, listening pointedly, through my memory, to my mother's historic warning, "Don't work yourself up, Katie." Her nurturing eyes warned me appropriately. I have a tendency to rush into experiences and I often will myself to feel them to the depths. To really gaze at the incredible; to weep at what is broken; to laugh until i pee my pants (and what mother wouldn't want to guard her daughter from such embarrassment?); to clench infuriated fists at the unjust; to intensify idiosyncrasies when i feel abnormal. But part of maturing has been recognizing my selfishness in my emotions and exercising my ability to control my intense knee-jerk reactions. Even Anne of Green Gables was a more attractive woman when she had learned to channel her child-like tantrums into selfless, productive love and labor.

I walked out of another church service this afternoon. At my school. Admittedly, I went to the Easter celebration with built-up and built-in prejudices about what it would be like. "It doesn't matter what they are doing, it matters what you are doing in your heart," I told myself as I closed my eyes to focus on the worship song, shutting out the chattering and wriggling teenagers so distracting my mind. It didn't take long, though, for my frustration to mount. In the pit of my stomach I can still feel the retching-churning that made me physically need to leave the gymnasium in the middle of the Easter presentation. This is my God, was a phrase rising from the roots of the swirling emotions that were welling, welling and scaring me in the pit of my spirit. A well-intentioned teacher had, after 10 minutes of dysfunctional video, sound, and lighting, just shown the bloody Jesus-whipping scenes from the Passion of the Christ movie. And the students laughed.

I was disgusted, and my face is still pink and burning as a result of my deep emotion - the emotion that I often leash (for good reason). And I was thankful for my mother teaching me to control my emotions because I didn't sink into anger - anger at the teacher who presented Jesus in a manner that students were actually set up to laugh (they were shocked! and were drastically unprepared to deal with the spiritual reality that might possibly have been evoked by the images) or anger at the students for laughing at the man that I adore more than any one or thing in the universe with a love unspeakable and depths I do not fathom. In spite of good reasons for anger, I was not angry.

When my hands stop shaking, I will be sad. And I pray, pray that my sickening reaction to the cultural Christianity and meaningless iconoclasm and mocking of Yahweh will only lead me, drive me, bore me deeper into the depths of Truth in my own heart. If I am sickened by others' disregard for spirituality at the heart level, then I must be one who acts spiritual in all that I say and do. I must hate lies in my own life and love Truth, and cling to the reality that I hope for but do not yet see. I must acknowledge my own hypocrisies and lean into, lean into, lean into my grace and salvation in a way that will, O please Jesus, impact a life around me. I must, or there would be no purpose to the physiological need to vomit that God's spirit allowed me to experience this afternoon.

This intensity scares me. And requires action.

typical

the above link is the epitome of typical indo road. footage from a trip to the ocean. beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

i'll go to ethiopia in two weeks. blessed, sweet communion and giggling over home-spun scarves -- no, no, i mean really spun-by-hand-at-home scarves -- and sharing of stories about the joys and aches of teaching at an int'l school... such will be the stuff I look forward to, as well as finally planting feet on a continent i've mooned over for years. i imagine the first thing i'll do upon arriving at said friend's homestead is find a place to strip off the shoes & socks and dig my toenails into the dirt.

i facilitated a socratic seminar yesterday with my grade 7 students. when i teach them a terse, tight-lipped, squeezed-lungs feeling wells up deep in my guts. there is such a visible tension in them (amidst growth) between self-control and whimsical un-filtered compulsions. i feel like i'm pushing a giant sieve onto a room full of octopuses (octopi?): their thoughts and laughter and homework and questions flinging themselves all around my classroom like tentacles while i desperately attempt to squelch the inappropriate and nourish the appropriate. if tools were needed, in one hand would be a machete and the other sheep shit (as my gardener likes to term fertilizer - 'oh, yeah, we need some sheep shit for your lawn.' - wha? ok, ya, dung. i chalk it up to the language barrier.). Anyway, amidst this pruning and weeding and nurturing, I allow and even create many moments of un-comfortability for them in class - just for the purpose of stretching them. In a socratic seminar it means that I often act like the awkward silences don't exist, and i don't recognize their pleading-eyed 'ma'am, I don't know what to say.' Because I want that they learn to shake off their gangly-limbed strange-ness in my safe classroom so that they can let the good ideas surface and learn to wait for the moments of 'aha.' And it happened yesterday. A group of awkward, giggling, silent-at-all-the-wrong-time seventh-graders floundered through the moment until finally they touched the heart of the matter. and question by question by mounting question by -now rapid-fire question- they explored the cosmic battle between good and evil and turned their minds right around to Creator God. it was beautiful.

and i wouldn't trade the difficulty of it for all the self-assured twelfth-graders in the world. (though, for their own reasons, and for the record, i love them too.)

Rainy Season

I’ve never been one to prefer an umbrella. Don’t buy them, don’t walk under them if they’re offered. And today I never would have tasted the rain on my apple if I had been using one. It’s been raining for two days straight. There is usually a break in the rain when a strong sun appears for a good few hours of the day, but in the past 48 hours no such thing has happened. And so my laundry hangs limply across strings inside my house, gradually losing it’s clothing-like shape as it silently surrenders to the creeping mold and damp air.

The reason, in the middle of this bird market, for the slight smile on my face, is that this boy let out this pink chic from his wooden bird cage and chased him (bare-footed) across the brick street. His baby-giggling and baby hands reaching for the pink chicken fluff is an image that will stick in my memory for years...