Haiti

A couple of weeks ago I spent several days in Haiti. The experience was unforgettable. The need in unimaginable. I will write about it at some point, but for now, here is a short montage of photos and videos from the trip.

Boogie Boarding

It is cold outside now and I’m thinking of the ocean. I like the cold, the way it fights its way around your collar and chills your neck, waking you from your oblivion and reminding you that you are alive. I like the briskness it puts in people’s step as they walk across a parking lot, seeking shelter in a warmer place. I like coats and boots, gloves and scarves, the 5 minutes of frigid tenseness as I wait for my vehicle to warm enough so that the heater blows warm air. I like the feel of a cold pane of a window beneath my palms and the tip of my nose, the gentle quiet of a falling flake of snow. I look forward to the cold. Dream of the cold. Welcome the cold. But it is cold outside today and I am thinking of the ocean. And it is warm there. I am not sure I would so much like the cold if I didn’t know there are places where it is warm.

I’m thinking of the ocean because I’m thinking of boogie-boarding. I haven’t been in quite awhile.

I was 14 the first time I caught a wave, lying on the face of the Pacific in a cove somewhere in Costa Rica. It was not as easy as it looked at first, and the waves were unforgiving, but my teacher, a Costa Rican boy a year or two my junior, was able to help me navigate the new environment on my cheap and well-worn board, rented from a vendor just up the beach and past the helado stand, 5 Colons for 2 hours.

Riding a boogie board is all about judging waves, determining where they will break while they are still a good way off from shore and then swimming into the proper position to take advantage of the wave’s energy. When properly timed, the wave will seem as if it is just about to crash on the rider before pulling you into its embrace, up on to its crest, and then hurling you forward atop its foamy remnants and depositing you on shore. A good ride on a good wave will in a matter of seconds move a rider from out beyond most of the smaller breakers and all the way to the barely-damp sand where tentative footprints of would-be waders are washed away, only to be replaced moments later by children chasing the retreating foam. It is quite a ride, and I was hooked from the first one.

A misjudged wave can be either benign or disastrous. In the best case scenario the swell will simply wash underneath the rider, breaking too late to be caught, but causing no need for evasive action. A wave breaking early, however, and just over the rider’s head, can throw you around like a rag doll, head over heels, and then pin you to the bottom until the wave subsides. If you are lucky, you will be able to regain your composure before the next wave treats you the exact same way. The ocean is relentless.

There are ways to mitigate some of this effect. When faced with a wave crashing over your head, the first instinct is to tense your body and stand your ground, bracing yourself against the wave, but this only exacerbates the effect. A better, though counterintuitive action, is to completely relax your body—to become part of the wave instead of a standing against it. It still makes for a churning ride, but you end up with far fewer bruises and scratches.

But there is something better, still, that you can do when the wave is coming and you realize that it will neither wash gently beneath you or take you for a wonderful ride. The best thing to do is to turn and face the wave, staring straight into it, and dive headlong and with all your might directly into the curving wall of water. When everything in you says stand firm or run the other way, the best thing to do is to face the wave head on. In this way you pierce straight through the wave, with only the smallest profile of your body diverting the energy of the wave around you. Soon thereafter you emerge on the other side of the wave, no worse for your baptism, and poised to catch a ride back to shore.

Though this technique was among the first my Costa-Rican friend taught me that first day in the Pacific, I have forgotten it several times, and I always have to retrain my body when I am lucky enough to have an opportunity to ride a wave. And so I’ve scraped knees, bruised shoulders, and filled plenty of swim trunks with sand as I have turned my back on the crashing waves of the ice-cold Pacific or stood in defiance against breakers in the Atlantic. All while I knew the secret, the key to avoiding the inevitable pain.

Life is a lot like the waves, in constant motion, the ebb and flow rising and falling and depositing us where it will. We float atop it and wait for an exhilarating ride, and those rides sometimes come. But we misjudge a number of waves, and for this there can be great consequences. Sometimes it is too late, and the only thing to do is to let go, to relax for the churn in the drink and come up spitting and gasping for air. But sometimes there is time to act, and for those who find it, they would do well to remember the lesson I learned on that Pacific shore so many years ago: When the wave is sure to crash over you, close your eyes and dive toward it with all of your might.

Learning to Fly

My son has learned to fly. Well, sort of. I grasp him firmly and lift him above my head and he stretches his arms and legs out like superman. From this new vantage point, he looks down at me and smiles. I told him tonight that it must be really cool to know how to fly, and that I would like to know how to fly, and how I wondered if he might teach me. He is 9 months old, and, obviously, is still unable to speak—at least with words. But he looked at me in that way he does and it seemed if he were saying, “Sure, dad, it’s simple to fly. All you have to do is find someone much stronger and much bigger than you are and who you trust more than anything else. And then you have to let them pick you up.”
Indeed, son. Indeed.

I edited this little video with my iPhone4 and imovie from the seat of my tractor during little stolen moments here and there. All of the videos and pictures were taken over the course of the last few weeks. I often wonder what my Great Grandfather did while on the tractor. While I carry along with me an ice-chest full of bottled water, cords to keep my electronics charged, and a phone that can access almost anything from anywhere, I remember that he had nothing more than a simple water jug and the thoughts in his head to keep him company. Maybe it was better that way, but I wouldn't trade my air conditioning for anything. I created the music to go with this with a little freeware program called Audacity along with a guitar and keyboard.

Two Mornings

Oh cruel sun, my fiend!
Why must you rise in such haste
And so coldly pry open
My eyes?

For I was sleeping,
Escaping
And now you have
Ruined it all.

Oh good sun, my friend!
Your gentle light and quiet warmth
Have kissed awake my eyes.

For I was sleeping,
Imprisoned
And now you have wakened me
To dream.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

For a good while after the birth of my son, after we started singing him nursery rhymes, I considered writing a couple of extra verses to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Let me go ahead and say right here that I often over think things. But the song just seemed incomplete as it was. There was a time somewhere in the past when people didn’t know the nature of a star, but here, in this modern world of ours, we understand the forces that create these magnificent objects. We know that they are more than simple, flickering, pinpoints of light hanging gently just beyond our reach in the sky above us. We know that instead they are massive beyond our comprehension, that they reach across greater distances than we can ever imagine, and that there are forces at work within them that we can hardy wrap our minds around. We know that gravity and fusion and radiation are at work in some combination to throw of this light that travels these untold distances to reach our eyes.

The verse I was going to write went something like this, and came right after the second refrain of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are”:

You’re a flaming ball of gas
Held together by the nuetron’s mass
Fusion makes you burn so bright,
Through the depths of space you shine your light,
Twinkle, Twinkle, great big star,
Now we know just what you are.

Yeah, it’s not that great lyrically, and I am not quite sure the science is spot on, but it is much closer to an accurate description of a star than a “diamond in the sky.” But I never incorporated the verse. It never made its way into my near nightly singing of the song. And the reason for my not incorporating it had nothing to do with the poor lyrics or questionable science. It had more to do with philosophy.

I think it all came to me the day I had my young son propped up on the back of our sofa, looking out the window at the trees waving in the wind and the cars passing by. There was this look in his eyes—sky blue and open wide—that I couldn’t quite discern. But as I sat there and thought to myself, “what is that little boy thinking—what thoughts are lurking behind those bright blue eyes?” it occurred to me that the look that I was seeing was one of wonder. It is not always what we know that makes our lives richer; it is what we wonder about. Wonder is one of the best things I can give my son at this point in his life. After all, it is what he has given me.

And so I never sang the new verse to the song. I don’t want my son to remain ignorant as to what constitutes a star, but he will learn it in time. For now I think it is just as healthy to look up at the sky and wonder about all those diamonds. After all, though not scientifically accurate, it is poetically true. To look at a star and dream is in many ways better than to look at a star and know its composition. After all, our dreams, at last the best of them, are much like stars: they are massive beyond our comprehension, they reach across greater distances than we can ever imagine, and there are forces at work within them that we can hardy wrap our minds around.

Strawberries and Sand: The Philosophy

I love strawberries, but if you buy the real kind, the ones from the country road-side stand that were picked earlier that morning and carried across the turn-row instead of the ones picked two days prior and trucked endless miles, you will almost always find that they are mingled with a little bit of sand. This makes them more authentic, not less appealing. The supermarket strawberries look better than their country counterparts, to be sure, but this is an illusion. Inside they are but bland and vapid, anticlimax cloaked in crimson. When you bite into an authentic country strawberry, though you must take care for the sand, the taste never disappoints. Real life is like the country strawberry. And life is about finding the strawberries amidst the sand.

Some time ago I came across a passage in "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" that has stuck with me ever since. Just three weeks before the raid on The Annex, the diary tells of how those who were helping hide the Frank family managed to procure a large amount of strawberries:

“We ate hot cereal with strawberries…bread with strawberries, strawberries for dessert, strawberries with sugar, strawberries with sand. For two days there was nothing but strawberries, strawberries, strawberries, and then our supply was either exhausted or in jars, safely under lock and key”(328).

I can’t begin to imagine after subsisting on a diet of potatoes, beans, and rice, with only the occasional dessert or piece of candy, how wonderful strawberries must have been. Even in the darkest of moments, it is the simple pleasures that take the sting out of human suffering. But my cynical side still wonders what the point was in making so much jam, of preserving so many strawberries for another day. They would not remain long enough to enjoy them. It is this balancing act of life that is most difficult to all of us—what to enjoy today, and what to save till tomorrow. I can’t help but wonder what happened to those preserved strawberries.

And so there are these two things we must do in life to stay sane, I think. We must find the strawberries amidst the sand, and we must find a way of both enjoying those strawberries today and preserving those strawberries for tomorrow. Writing is one of the few ways to do that, and this blog will be an exercise in that discipline.