St. Peter's Trekker

Coming home

2009-07-03T06:38:00.001-07:00

I walked out of the hospital after a busy day. From the hilltop overlooking the Potomac toward Virginia the sky lay like a landscape on the tops of the trees. It was that time of the evening when the light balances the dark. Long past sunset the crescent moon was a solid ball of gray cupped in a hand of bright flesh. It caught me and I stopped to look at it for a moment and take a big breath. The waning of the light and the mystery of the visible/invisible moon made me think of how we were slipping from one life into another.

After having returned home from our long journey, it has taken some time to get used to the now unfamiliar routine of things. Work, home, family, friends, and church, pets, houseplants, mail and dishes were all things we left behind when we went away. Now they are once again a part of our everyday existence. The things closest to our hearts and our everyday life were for a time far away from us. We ventured away from our home, our center, our life, creating a new one as we went. The time and energy we had focused on mundane tasks like opening the mail and washing dishes we spent on new tasks. Daily questions like, "What should we have for dinner?" changed to "What will happen today?" The first question presumed so much - a routine and a familiarity unnoticed until we left it. The answer to, "What will happen today?" depended on the time, the place, and our purpose in being where we were at the time. Dinner in Africa was cooked by the wonderful Matron Nancy and was brought to us, a surprise every day much like the rest of our visit there. Returning to England from the raw newness of Ghana, we were grateful when our friends fed us because it felt like Thanksgiving dinner every time - familiar, comfortable, and delicious. We rented a flat for some periods and so the dinner question like the place we stayed became familiar, the only new thing was locating the local grocery store. For the rest of the trip, we ate by a combination of necessity, chance and planning, following tips from waiters, fellow travelers, hotel owners and guide books with the inevitable failures and occasional memorable successes.

Daily life was dictated by our ever-changing circumstances. The heat or the cold, the room three stories up or the one on the ground floor, a place with a kitchen or a place with no refrigerator, a car or no car - all of these strongly influenced what we did and how we did it. It changed our life of habit to a life of infinite variety that demanded constant attention and adaptation. In the end we longed for sameness and habit, returning to the same Kofte shop in Istanbul 3 times just because it was familiar. The waiters knew us and laughed when they saw us coming, ushering us to a white marble table where we ordered the same simple thing every time - Kofte, white bean salad, and Ayran, a drink like buttermilk.

Doing things differently every day for 4+ months shed new light on the life we had left behind. We began to wonder, "Why, in fact, do we do things the same way every day, anyway?" Coming back, I am afraid I will forget important things and not act on perceptions that we had. I worry that the lessons we learned on sabbatical will be overshadowed by the demands of the life to which we return. Then I realize we can't un-see things truly seen or un-learn them if we truly learned them. We did not really leave a life behind but took our life with us in a new direction. And even if memories fade, like the moon at the balance of day and night, there will be times in the lulls between things when we can remember clearly. And then there are all the pictures....

Canterbury Cathedral

2009-06-05T04:34:00.000-07:00

This visit had more than its share of serendipity, enough to make us feel blessed and satisfied that we had made an fitting end to a wonderful voyage. Serendipity might not go far enough actually, but I leave that for others to ponder.

To begin with, there was the meeting in Hatchard's bookstore in Piccadilly Circle in London. While I stayed on at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Craig left, making a bee line for the bookstore. Browsing in a bookstore for a couple of hours was his idea of heaven on earth. Evidently Bishop Lee of Virginia had the same idea. As Craig was hunting for a title on the ground floor of the bookstore, he spotted our soon to be retired Diocesan Bishop coming up the stairs. In the course of their conversation they discovered they were both headed for Canterbury Cathedral that Sunday.

We stayed on the grounds of the Cathedral in the Lodge, a stone and wood Romanesque looking structure next to the Cathedral with lovely rooms facing on a courtyard. The courtyard was filled with green lawn and white roses following a flagstone pathway to a gate. As we walked back out of the courtyard toward the car to get our bags, Craig noticed a small oval plaque on the inner wall of the gate which thanked the Diocese of Virginia for supplying the funds to build the courtyard.

Then we kind of forgot that Sunday was Pentecost. So when Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury processed down the aisle to a packed cathedral including Bishop Lee and Mrs. Lee in the front row and the new Lord Mayor of Canterbury and his cabinet and their families, it was pretty wonderful. More wonderful since we had a great seat which we got because Craig convinced me to unpack his clergy shirt.

Craig had to work to convince me (the queen of packing) that maybe it was a good idea to wear his clergy shirt to Canterbury Cathedral. I needed a lot of convincing because the shirt was (tightly) packed on the bottom of the (biggest) suitcase (separate from its collar of course) in the car in the parking lot in the dark. (Look, I'm not saying I was being appropriately organized here - I was just focused on getting HOME.)

The next morning we came into the Cathedral crossing by a side door next to the lodge. We noticed that all of the seats in the front were reserved. Becoming more and more disappointed, I kept looking further and further back in the nave for a seat. But because Craig was wearing his clergy shirt, an usher seated him 15 feet from the altar in the front chair of the choir. There was not a stick of furniture or a person between Craig and the primate for the whole Eucharist. Craig said it made it hard to think. He just couldn't believe he was there.

Then Bishop Lee disappeared in the middle of the service. But that was alright because he shortly reappeared, processing up the aisle with a smile on his face during the offertory. He was bringing a gift from an organization called the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral of which he is president.

While being at Canterbury, the center of the Anglican universe, seemed overwhelming, seeing Bishop Lee walking down the aisle made it seem a little like home. It bound up the familiar and the unfamiliar, the grand and the comfortable - reminding us of what was shared by everyone in that cathedral - a history, a communion, and a liturgy found around the world. But we share more than that.

Thomas a Becket was murdered a few feet from the present day altar of Canterbury Cathedral. Three thick black wrought iron swords pointing ominously at a single spot hang suspended over the spot where he was killed. The sculptor captured the evil in the deed. The swords made me shudder. I felt hollow. I felt a grief for the man, but also I grieved for the loss of innocence. The murder of a priest in a holy place mocks the very idea of innocence. Thinking of all the conflict in the world, I mourned that we all shared that capacity for evil, too- if not directly, then by complicity. In my dark turn of mind, I thought, "This cannot be all we share." As I walked around the choir of this church that has stood for centuries, the rawness abated. I had time to think about where I was and what that meant. Canterbury is a vibrant and welcoming place. For generations, it has been a beacon of what was best in the world. With a thankful heart I thought, we all share this, too. We share in the love of God, and we share grace."

Santorini: A little time with Andrew

2009-05-24T07:58:00.001-07:00

We took a week to do nothing. Santorini in the Cyclades Islands north of Crete sounded like a good place to do it. Plus Craig had been talking about it for 30 years. High on a ridge overlooking a harbor where cruise ships looked like ships and not land masses, we opened our door every morning to whitewashed villages strung along the spine of the C - Shaped island. On the inner side of the ridge, villages with cobble stairs instead of streets spilled down the hillside clinging stubbornly to the rocky cliff underneath. They bubbled with barrel vaulted white washed houses and hotels built one on top of the other. On the other side of the ridge the sloping mountainside fell away into terraced farmland. The land gave way to small black sand beaches before it slipped into the salt water.

Legend has it that Santorini (or Thira as it is called) was the lost world of Atlantis. After erupting thousands of years ago, the center of the volcano is now 500 meters underwater on the floor of the sea. Lava has bubbled up slowly over millenia forming islands in the harbor. Occassional puffs of steam came out of the ground and rolled down the hillside until they disappeared. One person told me there was a tremor on the island at least once a week.

Thira was a thriving part of the Mycenean world whose
center was on Crete. The Myceneans were the fathers and mothers of the the Greeks to whom Western cultures especially owe so much. This was the world of Homer's Odysseus. It was sort of like putting words to music to read The Odyssey on this island. After having traveled around the Aegean, I recognized the names of Kings and kingdoms as I read them. What was once a world away and unfamiliar became real - so real that the three of us vied for the one copy we purchased. Andrew got first dibs, of course, and he couldn't put it down. I don't know why I was surprised. High drama, a son coming of age, adventure, action, loyalty, treachery and love, it was all there all the time, I just didn't see it.

Cave of the Apocalypse

2009-05-17T01:30:00.000-07:00

May 12, Patmos

We leave for Kos tomorrow on the afternoon ferry. We've been on Patmos for 3 days now, and it has made us realize how tired we were. We found a place to retreat overlooking one of the bays of the island and it is enough to simply sit and be. At least for a little while.

We visited a tiny convent. After winding our way along cobbled alleyways through canyons of whitewashed walls and blue and green doors, we arrived at a small courtyard and a gate. The sign on the side of the gate instructed us to ring the bell. We wondered if they meant that big brass church bell hanging over the gate. After pausing to gather our courage, we tentatively pulled the rope, rocking the bell until the it made a sound. Our loud summons was answered by the arrival of a black habited sister with the keys to the church. She let us in, sweeping aside curtains and giving explanations in Greek when she saw us puzzling over the identity of a saint.

One morning we drove toward a high hill topped by high crenelated walls. We found a monastery and church full of the wonderful frescoes in a town called Chora. Far below on the hillside was the "Cave of the Apocalypse" where St. John the Theologian was exiled and was said to have written the Book of Revelation.

"Cave of the Apocalypse" sounds so ..well..apocalyptic. There is no human scale to this phrase. I am just self centered enough to want something I can identify with in any story or image. That is how I connect and understand. The cave had a shrine-like quality, untouchable - from the small silver framed recesses of the cave where John is said to have laid his head to the church built into and around the cave. A guard stood watching our every move. No pictures were allowed. We walked around the silent church, the low undulating roof line of the cave on the right side gave way to the left, a stone addition made to enclose the cave. Windows were built into the wall looking over the island, into the fields and and beyond them, the sea. I sat in the window seat and just looked out over the valley. It occurred to me that if John sat in his cave he would have seen this very same thing. I thought that was good because now when I read the book of Revelation, I will have that image in my mind and I will know that when his mind was on human things, that is what John saw.

Craig left and went back in wanting quiet and a place for himself. At the doorway there was a basin of sand and a wooden rack of tall thin honey colored candles. We lit one saying a prayer for St. Peter's and our friends back home.

Disappearing clouds

2009-05-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

May 10th

We left the tourist town of Kusadasi, Turkey this morning on a boat for Samos, an island in the Greek Dodecanese. We're plying toward Patmos, the island in the Aegean Sea where John is said to have written the book of Revelation. I'm sitting on the top deck of an aged orange and white Greek ferry boat named the Nisos Kalymnos. Followed by dolphins, the boat is throwing white froth in its wake on a clear blue day in a topaz sea. We're sharing the ferry with a cement truck which is making the boat list heavily to port, but no one cares

After circumnavigating the Aegean Sea from West to East we have finally ventured into it. It seems like it has taken a long time to get here. The blues of the water and the blue of the sky tranquilize me like a drug. As we sit looking at the water, I notice two wispy white clouds. Dwarfed against the great open sky they float in the blueness. As I watch they disappear. The two clouds are the vanguard of a bank of weather that hovers just out of view over the Turkish mainland. As one solid white sentinel after another is blown over the sea, each one melts into the blue sky like cotton candy dissolving in your mouth - there and then not there. Like magic.

The magic of the disappearing clouds seems like the magic of the sun and sea on our fatigue. After weeks of rain and mud, neither the clouds nor our fatigue can stand against the perfect beauty of the turquoise sea or the sun. If Patmos is like this, I'm not sure I will be able to do anything except sit and look at it.

Paul in Ephesus and Philippi

2009-05-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

Ancient ruins and stone columns on their sides don't usually excite me, but as we walked the great wide marble streets of Ephesus together with hundreds of tourists, I got a sense of what it must have been like being home to hundreds of thousands of people. Ephesus is set between two hills. A broad marble street leads downhill past elaborate fountains and mosaic floored hill houses to a great lighted marble street (one of only 3 or 4 in the ancient world) leading grandly down to the port. As we walked we got a sense that the stuff of daily life here wasn't so different from our own and that Paul, the man who walked these streets preaching a new faith to a tough crowd (who owed their allegiance to Artemis) must have been more convincing than even the most skilled present day salesman. He did get in a bit of hot water by dissing Artemis and threatening the livelihoods of those involved in her worship, causing a riot to begin. Only the calming voice of a city official cooled the flames and foiled the lynching that surely would have proceeded had he not intervened.

In contrast to the narrow focused setting of Ephesus, Philippi's great open square lay in a valley where the distant hillsides surrounded it on all sides. The city seemed to ramble on and spread out forever. About 20 Km from the sea, Philippi seemed like home to normal people. Not so lucky in Philippi, Paul ended up in jail. There are various theories as to where, exactly Paul was held prisoner. Some contend he would have been in the area of the main square. I on the other hand thought he would have been held out of sight and out of mind over nearer the theater.

The remains of a large Byzantine church towered over the agora. Roofless, its shadows fell long across the stones in the encroaching evening. The characteristic terracotta and stone courses reminded me that one civilization builds on another. Craig's recollections of the site were formed long ago when far less had been excavated. I could see him reconciling his remembrance with the present and both marveling at their progress and mourning the gates and ropes, guards and admission booths that had not been there before.

Just the distances involved were impressive to me. Philippi, on the north shore of the Aegean in northern Greece was about 2 hours east of Thessaloniki or 6 or 8 hours west of Istanbul by car. Ephesus was about 6 or 8 hours south of Istanbul on the east coast of the Aegean in Turkey. Imagining the life Paul must have led traveling so far and wide selflessly proclaiming the Gospel made me read his letters in a new light. His trade - a worker with canvas and wood - seeming not so important when reading his letters without a context - seems crucial now as we imagined how he must have survived, living in and among the townspeople as a teacher and a craftsman. The real stones and structures begged the image of a real life.

Catching the Wave

2009-05-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

It was such a little thing, but it made me gasp. We were driving back from the Ihlara Valley south of Cappadocia across a broad and treeless green valley covered with the short green grass of early summer. Through the raking late afternoon sunlight we barreled down the two lane road that was meant to get city drivers from point A to point B without having to fiddle with the local dirt roads. At an intersection an oncoming dump truck, its front seat crammed with 2 or 3 men and 2 women, turned in front of us. We slowed to let them lumber across our path and as the passenger window came into view, I saw the weathered face of a woman, her headscarf tied in a traditional manner. Next to her sat another woman, similarly dressed. She waved. Then her friend at the window did the same. As the truck turned and accelerated on its way, I saw a blue tarp covering the back. Half standing, half sitting on top of the tarp were 5 or 6 women dressed in what for them were work clothes, but to my eyes the skirts, blouses, and scarves seemed beautiful and exotic. I must have been waving because they all - one by one - caught the wave and in the end all of us were waving with both arms. I felt that if I stopped waving the slender thread of that moment would break and then it would be over. Both they and I waved as if we were long lost friends soon to be separated forever.

I have missed the company of women on this trip. Particularly in places and cultures where we are unlikely to meet "normal people" and especially in cultures where women are still sheltered and sometimes patronized, I haven't had a chance to talk to many women. I have a shadowy awareness that the way I look at life is uniquely my own and that it is different from a Turkish woman (read Ghanaian, Greek or British)(or Turkish, Ghanaian, Greek or British man) But being an American woman makes it improbable that I will never fully understand the generation and perpetuation of a life that is not mine.

When I lack a way to communicate with other women in words or in real time I have looked for alternatives to words and conversations. As I looked at the textiles made in Turkey I realized I was most likely looking at the work of the hands and sometimes the heart of a a Turkish woman. I am sometimes dazzled by their beauty and their skill. I never fail to appreciate the time and energy taken to create what amounts to a national product, but sometimes - especially in the older pieces woven in hopes of a home and family, in the spontaneous and sometimes quirky design of a horse blanket or a cradle, the voices of the women I will never meet speak to me. They speak of family pride, the dangers of jealousy, the hope for happiness and children, the strength of love - the weaving itself a language written with the hand passing over and through the wool or cotton or silk threads for many hours every day.

I think that's what made me gasp. The recognition that I had finally seen the woman that made the weaving. Women who are living a kind of life that is handmade; a kind of life that is passing away. These were the women who work for their families with the same hopes and concerns, loyalties and pride as the weavers I would never meet. And they waved at me with smiles on their faces and excitement. For once I was not a tourist but maybe someone like them.

Leaving Urgup

2009-05-08T01:37:00.000-07:00

Cappadocia has been amazing. The landscape, the caves and cities, the wall decorations and frescoes came from so many times and so many people. There was an infinite variety of style, but recurring stories and themes that, interpreted by different artists, gained new meaning every time we saw them. I got lots of ideas for things like needlepoint and graphics and (if Irena will allow :) icons. It did't hurt to look anyway!

We're sitting at a dark wood table in what used to be the refectory of a monastery and is now the dining room of our hotel where we have a breakfast of tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, bread, yoghurt and cheese every morning. Oh and I can't forget the Nutella. The incredibly strong tea which one is supposed to dilute with water but which Craig thinks is just fine the way it is and my instant coffee wake us up every morning and power us through until about 11 AM. We don't fear because there is nowhere in this world so much tea as in Turkey. Any store will provide it for the price of a discussion about a purchase.

Just for fun, we walked through the grocery store on our way to dinner last night. Along with the things everyone eats, one entire aisle provided a selection of tea in large bags, fresh smelling and colorful. Of course if you didn't like black tea, there is always Emla Chai - Apple tea. My new favorite.

The van to the airport will pick us up in about 15 minutes. We will fly to Izmir, then drive to Kusadasi. Tomorrow we will see Efes, or Ephesus where Paul visited and preached. I can't wait.

Cappadocia

2009-05-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

About half way through our week in Istanbul we took courage and made a plan to go east to Cappadocia. At one time, Cappadocia was a hotbed of Christianity. Living and worshipping in relative safety here, Christians retreated from the danger of persecution into the caves, tunnels and underground cities that lined the canyons and riddled the tall tufa "chimneys" in this volcanic landscape. When danger threatened, the inhabitants rolled large rocks resembling millstones across the entrances to the cities. The inhabitants could live for a month or so without leaving the safety of their citadel as even the water wells were inside the chimneys.

So far 26 cities, innumerable cave houses some still inhabited, and hundreds of cave churches have been discovered. It is believed there are many more. The unique soft volcanic tufa landscape is constantly changing with rain, wind and exposure, new chimneys forming under foot as the tufa crumbles and is washed away, some huge vaulted chambers, sheltered for centuries suddenly exposed as a cliff side falls away for lack of strength. Once a unique and useful defensive location along the Silk Road, the principal trade route across Asia, some of the caves and cities have existed from the time of the Hittites while later Christians adapted the cities, carving into the soft rock multi-storied networks of tunnels and ventilation shafts sometimes reaching 8 or more stories underground.

A striking feature of both the cities and the smaller cave houses is the number of churches found among them. Ranging from small chapel-like structures with simple red line decorations to large barrel vaulted multi-story basilicas complete with frescoes, the number of churches is estimated to be around 600 in this area. Sometimes high up in the canyon wall, and sometimes far below ground, each one is different having served a unique community. The largest and grandest churches among them however are no bigger than the Nave of St. Peter's.

There is one church that puzzles me still. As we approached the chimney from the outside, there was no hint of what lay inside the cave. We walked up 2 stairs cut into the rock entering a five domed basilica, its geometry perfect, the 5 hemispheric roofs were cut and smoothed supported on classical columns. The architecture of the space echoed the grand architecture of imperial courts and urban design. What confused me was the contrast between the architecture and the painted decoration. Primitive red line drawings and stepped graphics abstractly represented Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A rooster, crosses and a figure that looked like a turtle standing on its hind legs decorated the domes. Whoever decorated the church drew freehand lines representing stone blocks on the arched entrance vault overhead. As I looked at the drawings, I felt a need to know who drew these red line drawings. The work of the their hands lay so near the work of their heart I could almost see the painter. He or she is many centuries gone now, but part of the painter survived to speak to me. It is these works of the hand that pull at my heart strings - the ones that show not the skill of the artist, but the human hand and the human heart that made them.

Colors

2009-05-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

May 3, 2009, Urgup, Turkey

We left Istanbul this morning on a Turkish Airlines plane with turquoise leather seats. We arrived in Nevsehir an hour after we left Istanbul, traveling by van to Urgup where we will be staying for the better part of the next week. I loved the turquoise seats. This is not a color one would pick as a neutral. I think that is one thing among many that I will remember about Turkey. Color is everywhere. From the shades of a Kilim to the deep reds and blues of the carpets, from the thousands of textures and colors in every textile imaginable to the yellows and browns of the Ottoman houses and the brilliant glazes on the ceramics. Color joyfully inhabits everything.

Americans are taught that stripes don't go with other printed fabrics. Oranges don't "go" with pinks. You shouldn't wear 2 prints together. Who made these rules? I for one want to know. Whoever it was has not been to Turkey.

Starbucks

2009-04-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'm at Starbucks. OK, it's in Istanbul. I swore I wouldn't go, but I couldn't stand it any longer. As we were wandering around Taksim Square, lost and in need of a a fix of caffeine we noticed no less than two Starbucks. After we had passed the umpteenth Doner Kebab shop and not really being all that hungry, the dark and familiar doorway of Starbucks literally sucked us in. So now I'm sitting here with my tall Americano and Craig with his Chai trying to orient ourselves to a new part of town. Starbucks is Starbucks, no matter where you go.

Another thing I've noticed no matter where we've gone (and I've said this before) is that when you strip away the environment and material of the world, people everywhere are pretty much the same. There are kookie whistle blowing street people in every city. There are kind people everywhere. A good sales man or woman is good in Turkey, Greece, or New York. People everywhere have to work for a living, doing the best they can. People everywhere agree that prayer is important as every tolling bell and call to prayer attests, but most people don't pray as they should or could. I don't see any more people running to the mosque when the call to prayer comes than I do to church when the bells toll. No matter how long I live, I will never see the whole world, but the more I do see of it, the more hopeful I am that if we could learn from one another rather than try to convince one another that our way is better, that the world would thrive.

Staying in the Sultanahmet, in the midst of religious and secular monuments like Hagia Sophia jealously plundered by both Christian and Muslim forces in their turn reminds me of the cost we bear for living in competition rather than companionship. I'm not talking about the kind of competition found in sport which involves the heart and soul of the competitors, but the kind of competition that cares nothing for the other person except to take away a prize. Competition based on covetousness depends on ignorance. In competition based on covetousness, to know the "other" is to be weakened. Companionship on the other hand, implies knowledge of the "other." Even the word implies a sustained period of togetherness which permits one person to know another and even to share with another. In our world, distance and language separate us from one another and don't easily permit companionship, but the world is shrinking, so both the opportunity and need for companionship must increase. If distance and language are the problem, then in every opportunity I have on this trip to bridge distance and language I find hope. And I hope for more.

Sheep

2009-04-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

Everywhere we go I seem to notice the sheep. Driving over the Yorkshire Dales, over the mountains of Greece, and even in the stone carvings of early Christian Churches in Turkey, I see sheep. I don't know what it is about the furry little creatures, but I love them. Maybe it's because we had sheep when I was a child. Well, first we had pigs. My parents' first house was a farm in western Pennsylvania 25 miles north of Pittsburgh. The house, barns, corn crib, fields and woods were our playground and they figured prominently among my first memories. I'm not sure why we got the pigs. My dad worked in the city. Maybe it was a little like the television show "Green Acres", except our pigs were confined to the barn and one of ours was named Twinkle Toes. After the pigs disappeared, (my brother and I wouldn't eat pork chops for a while) we tried sheep. Patrick and Matilda were the Adam and Eve of our little flock. After that came Joshua and Jericho, then not in any particular order and not necessarily of the tribe of Patrick came Granny, Mary, and several others. The Ewes tried to nibble our leather shoelaces when we came down the stairs into their pen from the upper barn, but Patrick tried to board us into the wall like a 250 pound hockey player with a grudge. We steered clear of Patrick. When possible.

Sheep figure into early Christian decoration of churches, too. We went to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul - a soaring monument to power, it has served as a the "center of the universe," the imperial church, the first church in Christendom where the Byzantine Emperors were crowned and a great mosque after the fall of Constantinople. Now a museum, the building overtakes my senses with its scale. Easy to miss after all that grandeur was a small area off to the side dedicated to the fallen arches, columns, and decoration surrounding a drawing of the earlier Hagia Sophia. (The first St. Sophia was destroyed and the current church built over and around the site of the older church.) There on the grass were two long carved stone lintels decorated with sheep following one another nose to tail along the line of the carved molding. I noticed them immediately and thought, in the midst of all this imperial architecture and grandeur, in the vacuum created by the prohibition of figural art, the sheep were so welcome and familiar looking that they became at once one of my favorite things about the day.

Istanbul

2009-04-27T00:43:00.000-07:00

Craig and I have decided that airline food has reached a new low. As if that were possible. When Olympic Airlines says there will be dinner service on a plane, eat before you go. We think there was a film of tuna salad in the dry hot dog roll wrapped in saran. We're still not for sure it was tuna. I did however have a split of red wine with it. Followed by something like a frosted twinkie which cracked when you bit it. I kept thinking we hadn't had dinner, but we had. Just unsatisfying.

However things looked up when we arrived at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul and were met by a welcoming man who helped us with our luggage and drove us to the hotel in the Sultanamet overlooking the Blue Mosque. Craig found this hotel from our guidebook. It said it was in the center of the old city. That sounded good to us. The picture of the hotel, a yellow wooden Ottoman looking house with a warm wooden front door, was charming. They had internet and breakfast and a reasonable rate. We arrived tired and a little anxious. The man at the desk took us up to a small classic looking room with a comfortable looking bed. So far so good. I went over to the window and, seeing a door, decided to open it. It led out onto a small balcony. Looking out into the night, I saw the spires and domes of the Blue Mosque filling the entire skyline, lit from below like a fantastic castle. This made me completely forget about the crummy tuna sandwich.

Stairs

2009-04-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

The muscles of my legs are tender. I didn't realize how mountainous Greece was. For the last 4 days we have visited late Byzantine sites in Greece. Mystras in the Peloponnese and Meteora at the foot of the Pindhus Mountains were both built on mountaintops. In both places the only way up is on foot. Hundreds and hundreds of stairs allowed us to thread our way up and down the narrow roads and passageways of Mystras and scale the towering rocks of the Meteora. Stairs of weathered marble, worn and dark with age, stairs of brick hollowed by the feet of generations, stairs cut out of the rock face of the cliff, reconstructed stairs, stairs of earth and wood, you name it, we did it. Remember the scene in the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only" where the Bebe the ice skater and her lecherous patron (the bad guy) along with the blond haired thug who wants the nuclear triggering device are hiding out on top of one of the monasteries? We were there. It turns out that they won't bring you up in those little nets and I don't rock climb. So the stairs were it. I don't care if I ever see another stair.

Mystras, cleared of its last inhabitants in the middle of the 1950s, is now a World Heritage site. The mountainside once inhabited by kings and princes and 45,000 inhabitants is abandoned. Only the bricks and stones, stairs and empty buildings are left. Some are ruins, visible only by the outline of their foundation peeping out of the early summer (by our standards) grass. Some of the brick and stone buildings have been preserved or renovated, terra cotta tiles banding the building, their barrel vaults and domes creating an intricate skyline. Inside the churches, frescos and stone carving tell of a church closely allied with power, its angels clothed as soldiers, the , finial on the bishop's throne the family crest of the ruling Paliologos. Walking between the ruined walls and narrow cobbled streets overgrown with wildflowers and red poppies made me wonder what life must have been like for her inhabitants.

A fortified city, Mystras was the last capitol of the the Byzantine Empire. Built on a mountainside near Sparta, its 3 defensive city walls circled the hillside like curtains. The population, made up of skilled artisans and craftspeople came to Mystras to seek the patronage of the wealthy and the powerful. Although the frescos and stone workmanship, the architecture and artifacts tell the story of Mystras, they are at the same time a ghostly reminder. Walking the same streets that thrived with life 700 years ago called a culture to the imagination.

Unlike Mystras and 6 hours north by car, Meteora is a collection of monasteries built on top of towering islands of rock. Built about the same time as Mystras, many of the monasteries are close together, each one on top of its own rock island. Viewed from the road approaching the mountains, one monastery looks as if it is about to slide off its precarious perch into the valley below.

Unlike Mystras, the churches are still in use by the monks and sisters. The architecture is similar but adapted for the unforgiving environment. Meteora's frescos are beautiful, but most lack the surprising beauty of Mystras'. The tour buses have found Meteora, so it's kind of hard to feel like anything other than a tourist unless you watch for an opportunity when there are no tour groups in the churches. One thing about the tour groups, though -- as I watched other people huff and puff up the stairways, I didn't feel so bad for huffing and puffing myself. ...

Easter in Athens

2009-04-19T10:50:00.001-07:00

I wish I could tell you that we went to lots of Easter services in Athens, but I can't - exactly. We had some travel delays that made our plans go up in smoke. But the fact is that no matter what you do, Easter in Athens surrounds you.

On our way home from Piraeus after a long and unexpected delay at the gate where we got off our boat, we took the metro back to our flat. By the time we got off the metro, it was fully dark. We knew we had missed the local Easter service when we followed a woman walking up the dark street, pocketbook hanging from her elbow, holding her long candle whose flame she carefully protected with her cupped hand. As we walked down the sidewalk every door was shuttered and every shop closed with three notable exceptions. The confectioners. Each of the three brightly lit stores stood with their doors open to the night like welcoming beacons in an ocean of darkness. Their plate glass front walls were polished, the delicious Galatoboureko and baklava, Easter breads baked with a red egg in the center and short delicate cookies displayed with pride. They seemed like little jewel boxes. Exhausted and hungry, we made a bee line for our doorway and a quick dinner of pasta and the leftover cheese we had bought on one of the islands for a snack. We were just wondering if we had the energy to stay awake and try to go out or give up and go to sleep when the city exploded with the sounds of ringing bells near and far and the furious popping and banging of firecrackers. It was midnight. Easter was here.

The next morning we turned on the television to see how the holiday played out in the media. The first thing we saw was an Greek airforce jet on the tarmac. We waited expectantly, wondering what political piece of news would follow. (Craig can follow the modern Greek a little, so we get a general idea) The door of the jet opened and out of the darkness of the doorway came a monk clothed in his black habit holding a large lantern. Holding the light slightly aloft, he carefully descended the stairs to the runway crowded by excited people. After making a statement to the waiting crowd, and deferring to another politician for another statement, the monk and the politician got into a waiting limosine and were wisked off.

What followed were pictures of the lighting of the first fire in Jerusalem, from which this fire had come, A picture of a man having just lit his torch from the first fire running through the gathered crowd. His mouth open with an unheard cry, he catapulted away from the fire, holding his brightly blazing torch high above his head less like a prize than a banner of victory at the head of an unseen army. The teasers for the news were excerpts of speeches by 3 Patriarchs and 3 Archbishops of the Orthodox Church from all over the world. What followed was the full coverage of the Patriarchs of Contantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. This was followed by the full coverage of 3 more speeches from the Archbishops of Albania, Athens and all Greece, and the Americas. The rest of the news of the world took about 5 minutes. That pretty much says it all.

Athens and everyday life

2009-04-17T14:22:00.000-07:00

Well, we've been in Athens since Tuesday. The first day was characterized by the now familiar disorientation. The second day, Craig was raring to go, but I was nervous about venturing forth, so we went to the Byzantine Museum on our newly minted weekly Metro pass - what a deal! Since then we have ridden around the metro all day long just for the heck of it, taking in the Plaka and Acropolis, Pireus, and the Kolonaki neighborhood. Today we went to the Archeological Museum near Victoria Station. Tomorrow we head off to Pireus at an early hour to take a side trip to Aegina and Hydra, two of the Greek Islands near the Athens coast.

Sunday is the Greek Orthodox Easter, so tonight (Friday) was Good Friday. Crowds spilled out of the doorway of the church on the Plaka, which amplified the chant so it could be heard outside the door and throughout the neighborhood. Street peddlers were selling candles for the service. They were long honey colored tapers with a red or clear plastic wax guard. We walked over the dark cobbles in the dark of evening looking up at the Acropolis which Athens lights up like Las Vegas. You can pick out every pit of every stone from a long way away. It really is beautiful.

I've had so many thoughts and ideas about things to write, but I find that things are moving too fast. We don't have the long periods of time in one place that afforded me the time to think. I also think that being a little nervous about plans for the future, like where you stay next, makes it hard to think past the necessities. Some of my musings have centered around silly things like, "How come there are so many kinds of toilets in the world?" or similarly, "Why are there so many kinds of door knobs in the world?" These are the things that keep me up at night. But really. not to be too indelicate, it's important to know the mechanical capabilities of various conveniences. I never worked up enough courage to ask my friend Fiona why there were two levers on some bathroom devices. On the single ones do you keep holding the lever down or pump the lever? Or in Greece, I'm happy to just find the lever.

The doorknob question is another thing. Some turn, but some doorknobs have spring loaded buttons which you push and voila, the door opens. Some are just window dressing. Some doors need two hands to open, like the gates in Cambridge. You had to turn a large wrought iron hoop above while pushing down on a modern lever below. 3 times on 3 different doors before you could reach your goal (room). The reason the doorknob thing concerns me is not so much a deeply rooted psychological problem as an experience I had in Italy at a conference in 1996. It was late on the night before I was supposed to give a talk in front of a group of international doctors and nurses. I was a little nervous and couldn't sleep. I snuck into the bathroom to read for a little, thinking it would calm me down. When I felt sleepy enough to try to rest again, I couldn't open the bathroom door. I tried everything I could think of, even getting a little panicky when I couldn't wake up Craig. It turns out that even though these doorknobs look like the standard bedroom doorknob with a push button lock in the center, they are not. The little button which on our doors, locks the door, on the Italian doors, opens the door. Hmmm.

Since my humiliation of that night, I have never trusted doorknobs to be the predictable mundane household items we all know. Indeed, they are capable of causing more than a little problem! So when I have a moment of failure trying to open unfamiliar doors as one would reasonably expect, I move quickly from puzzlement to panic.

Three White Chimneys

2009-04-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

After we saw the Mappa Mundi (and the library of course) and had walked around Hereford for a bit, the temptation to cross the border into Wales overcame us. (We were 10 miles away) On the way from Cuddesdon to Hereford the sweeping low folds of the Cotswold hills had given way to the deeper vales and higher hills of the west. This is the landscape that inspired The Shire for Tolkein. There is a roundness about the hills. As we drove closer to the Welsh border, the hills became dotted with farmsteads and sheep.

“Can't you see it? The three white chimneys!” Craig pointed with one hand as he drove with the other. He had spied a collection of white buildings on a facing hillside. The house had three white chimneys.

“That sounds like the name of a house or a book title,” I said. The words, simple and each clear and descriptive, were so catchy together. Had I been a traveler needing to discriminate one farmstead from another I might well have been told to look for the house with three white chimneys. It was visual shorthand. Where the land is mostly pasture, the farms look similar. But a traveler could have picked out a house with three white chimneys. Plus, it sounds good. I wouldn't mind if my house were called Three White Chimneys. In the car, scenery like this passes like a movie, but on foot or horseback, this walk must have seemed long and lonely. I wonder how much the car has changed life for the people here.

As the sun was fading we tried to pack in as much looking as we could. Stopping here and there, we saw the ruins of an old priory, Abbey Dore, that we had to approach by walking down a farmer's driveway, his cows sheltered in a barn constructed on the foundation wall. As time ran out, we noted a British Heritage site called Skenfrith Castle and decided to head there. The signs to the site and our trusty TomTom led us along a narrow twisting river valley first on one side and then the other. We came upon it suddenly. The huge hulk of the castle was unattended and surrounded by spring grass. We parked across from the row of cottages that faced the castle. The daylight quickly fading, the first thing I noticed when I opened the car door were the shouts of 3 or 4 boys and an equal number of girls of various ages as they carried on a rather free form but spirited game of soccer. Their bicycles had been dropped where they stopped. The air had the moist feel of early evenings in the spring when the warmth of the day falls precipitously to the coldness of night, the dew forming on grass almost as we watched. As we made our way around the castle wall to the entrance, the children noticed our presence, but quickly returned to their attention to the game. As walked up the stone stairs, the ball bounced near us on the castle wall and back into play. There were no motion sensors or ropes and guards, no admission booth. No one paid any attention to the 2 strangers wandering through the soccer game and into the roofless castle and keep.

Mappa Mundi

2009-04-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

April 1, 2009, Cuddesdon

On one of the last days we were in the south of England, we decided to venture to the west to see the Mappa Mundi, the oldest complete map of the world in Europe if not the world. Created by a medieval monk in Lincolnshire, it is now housed behind thick glass in a special fire and earthquake proof safe beside Hereford Cathedral. As we entered the dimly lit room we saw the pale trapezoidal shape of the skin filled with a great dark circle. The circle itself was filled with all kinds of cartography – oceans were dark, the land masses pale, the islands in the Aegean filling most of the lower half of the map whose center was Jerusalem. Surrounding the busy circle was the realm of the heavens, and at the apex of the piece of vellum was Jesus on his throne. In the bottom left corner the maker of the map pictured himself kneeling. Next to his own figure, he wrote the words, “pray for me.”

From a distance the Mappa Mundi reminded me of a page in an old biology book I saw at an antiquarian bookseller. In this biology book the pages had turned creamy with age like the vellum. The black and white circle in the book illustration stood in contrast to the surrounding text not only because of its size and shape, but also because it looked like a pen and ink drawing where the typeface had a more mechanically produced appearance. The contrast between the type and the picture was jarring. The words themselves seemed like a kind of code on the page, rigid and methodical. The drawing seemed more visceral.

The cell was a doorway to understanding life itself. The cell was not completely understood, but the attempt to make what was known understood was made by using a drawing because the precision and abstractness of words were inadequate to describe this understanding. The Mappa Mundi was a similar attempt to describe what the map maker knew about something not completely understood – the world. Like the cell illustrator, the maker of the map located the known lands and people within the dark circle of his world. In drawing the space the map maker ordered the universe – like a single cell. The nucleus Jerusalem, the walls surrounded by the forces that ruled its world. The perfect circle declared the border of this world as if to say, “This is where human understanding ceases and the understanding of God begins.

The attempt of the author to organize his world into some kind of order is something I look on with a certain amount of wonder. Unitary constructs are so neat - like the lady we overheard in the tea shop trying to organize all the "isms" of the world along a continuum for her daughter. It is tempting to rationalize the world into a line or a “circle.” I also feel a certain amount of affection for the author. I try to order my little world every day and ,with some rare exceptions, it never “turns out like the drawing”. So I feel I understand the urge of the map maker as I think we all can. Granted, the scale of the project - ordering the universe and placing God in his heaven does seem rather a tall order. No wonder the map maker asked us to pray for him. Craig and I miss all who normally inhabit our world, a world that doesn't even make it into the map maker's imagination. I wonder what he would think?

Bookbinding and thoughts on the nature of knowledge

2009-03-28T04:01:00.000-07:00

My interest in bookbinding began when I noticed the uniformity and condition of the books I saw on our visit to the Trinity College Library in Oxford.

This week we went to Dublin and saw the book of Kells. The Book of Kells is a 9th century manuscript of the four Gospels illuminated by Irish monks. Simultaneously the prize and plunder of epic conflicts in Ireland, the book survived, having been given finally to Trinity College in Dublin for safekeeping. Along with the 4 books themselves, there was a display of the art of bookmaking and binding. As part of the exhibit there was a wonderful video of a book being bound. The process of making a book was the product of many skills. Binding the book, preparation of the materials like leather and glue, twine and paper, and the preparation of print, ink, plates and the putting together of the quires were all separate activities performed by skilled crafts persons and each craft evolved its own set of skills.

For this part of our trip, the old travel narratives, both their content and their form as books were to be the focus. What we learned was that the meaning of books seemed to arise and dissolve with the times and the cultures they inhabited. Books were a way of organizing and transmitting knowledge. The limits of the technology of bookmaking formed the limits of the way we organized and diffused knowledge. (The knowledge could only go as far as the book could travel.) In cultures that evolved in the age of the book, the diffusion of knowledge depended on the availability of scholars and their books. The book was precious because it contained knowledge, and without the book, the knowledge was lost.

These days knowledge - some kinds anyway - travels without covers and without paper or ink. The limits of bookmaking technology no longer apply. The development of content and the imprimatur of peer reviewed scholarship is still done "the old fashioned way" but it is as if the content of books themselves have escaped their covers and scattered, exposing the nature of knowledge to a larger society. Where books and therefore knowledge once seemed finite and distant, a different understanding of knowledge has evolved with time. The big secret is out. Knowledge can be created and it can change.

We have come a long way from the bookbinders.

Dublin or Why musicians are special

2009-03-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

We decided to go to Dublin.

Every time we have thought about taking a "big" trip we tarry around the idea of Dublin or Ireland. The romance of it is almost irresistible. The contrast of the sheep-dotted fields of green grass and the low stone walls so close to the ocean and its pitiless wind just rings in the mind like the minor chord in a song that pulls at your heart strings. And we've long loved Irish music.

Our friends Bill and Dodie came from Cambridge, (Mass). They stayed in Oxford for a few days visiting with us out in "the country" and making forays into Oxford on a regular basis. Once "the boys" got Dublin in their sites, Bill and Craig were lured by the Chester Beatty Library (the home of the some of oldest known fragments of the gospels), the Book of Kells, and the promise of some awesome Pints in some awesome Pubs in the city where, if popular legend is to be believed, God invented Pints and Pubs.

That and the 29 pound sail/rail deal. For 29 pounds you could take the train to Holyhead and catch the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. It sounded so easy.

For the return trip, the taxi driver we called for 6:45 AM came as requested. We told him the tale of our many connections on our way back to the ferry. He said, "Why din't ya jest fly? I flew to Manch'ster far 29 Euros the weekend." Granted we saw wonderful countryside, a part we would never have seen had we not gone by land. The train followed the north shore of Wales where we watched the shore turn from stone to sand, saw the sheep grazing in salt meadows, their lambs at their sides. We had a 3 hour ferry crossing over some cold, grey and wind whipped ocean that made me wonder at the courage of sailors. But I was thinking on the way back to the ferry dock that once was maybe enough.

I decided it was all worth it though because of the "Session." We went to dinner at a Pub called the "Brazen Head" on the South side of the Liffey River that flows through the heart of Dublin. Reputed to be its oldest pub, it was a few blocks from the apartment we had rented with our friends. We walked along sidewalks and over a bridge, the river on one shoulder and the city traffic on the other. We spotted the place and ducked in the doorway to find a pub with a bar, 6 or 8 small dark tables surrounded by low stools and red upholstered benches along the walls. We ordered our meals and a round of pints, glad to be warm, out of the wind, and together. Our plates arrived, their fashionably over sized diameter making it impossible to get four of them on our table without offsetting their centers just a bit.

Just as we were finishing our meal, I saw 2 fellows make their way to the corner table next to ours holding instrument cases and some electrical equipment that looked like small amps and a table microphone. I said to my friends, "This is a very good sign." What followed was the addition of 4 or 5 more musicians, their friends and their equipment who widened the circle to include the corner of our table. The tuning proceeded without too much fuss and when the first note sounded, the pub, already an intimate space, became a gathering of people focused on their muse. After the first bar, the fiddle player set the pace with his heel on the ancient wooden floor. The vibration was catching as it traveled up my leg. I was not alone, as it could be felt by everyone in the room, who, along with the other musicians became part of the music.

Good music doesn't just have a rhythm, it floats you along on a tide of sound over which you have no control. The spoon and the Bodrhan players shape their songs from skin and muscle. The skill and wisdom of the storyteller come from the singer and the song. The humor and heart of all the musicians is evident on their faces and in their music. The volume never oppressive, the music is just loud enough to command attention. When you listen, you can hear the wisdom or longing or the expectation of suffering of a people still here in the midst of life, seeing no contradiction in this. Together, these players, the spoon player, the guitar, mandolin and button box players, the Bodrhan player, the singer and the penny whistle player bore us along with their strength, the work of their hands, their voices and their hearts. Afterward we were not the same as we had been before.

Trinity College Library

2009-03-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

Libraries have a mystical hold over Craig. On a tour of Oxford's Trinity College arranged for us by the Chaplain of the college (who happens to be the wife of the principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon where we are staying) we were privileged to learn about the history of the College and to go into Trinity's library and archives. The central quadrangle of buildings of Trinity College, founded by Sir Thomas Pope in the 16th century already existed in the form of Durham College, which from 1286 until the Reformation provided a place of study in Oxford for monks sent from the Benedictine Cathedral Church at Durham. The Library of Trinity was seeded by Durham's collection and most of this is housed in the old library.

Walking under archways and through courtyards, we came to the modern library. As Craig climbed the staircase leading to the door, his face was like a child's at Christmas time, full of anticipation and excitement. The main floor was surrounded by a two story stack. Short staircases and narrow galleries extended the book collection far up onto the walls. Sitting at the desks, the students had that fatigued end of term look. When we were taken to the oldest part of the library housed in the oldest building in the college the first room we entered was disappointingly utilitarian - pale colored wooded bookcases, the books locked away behind wire screens so thoroughly obscuring the shelf we weren't even sure there were books. But after we exchanged niceties with the man cataloging archives (after 6 or 7 centuries) we came to the door to the old library.

When it opened, my first impression was of dimness, special blue window shades having been pulled down to protect the books from the effects of light. Then I had the sense of extreme orderliness and regularity despite the various widths and heights of the volumes, each shelf neatly arranged, no book protruding over another, no book receding between its neighbors. No frayed bindings or crumpled edges here, either. The volumes with their leather bindings gave the room a uniformity of appearance. The shelves of books marched down the room toward the arched window at the end. The cases extended from the high ceiling to a floor of wide dark and polished wooden planks worn smooth as silk, dipping slightly in the middle of the room with the weight of the volumes that had been there for centuries.

With the librarian Craig was allowed to take down one or two of the volumes. With his usual uncanny talent for picking the right book off the shelf, found a tall slim volume, about the size of an atlas of - Hakluytus posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrimes : contayning a history of the world in sea voyages and lande travells by Englishmen and others - chronicling the early explorations and voyages that have interested him for so many years.

After a lovely, but definitely not healthy lunch with some of the fellows of the college and a walk through gardens full of daffodils and crocuses, flowering apples, pear and hawthorn trees, and the special Fritillaries of which the Oxford area is so justifiably proud, we came back to Ripon College, a beautiful spot in its own right. We just let things soak in for the rest of the day which was beautiful and sunny.

Creatureliness

2009-03-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

Our camera is great. It is helping us chronicle the daily life of our trip, helping our memory recall sights and sounds, events and insights. We are constantly changing lenses, though and it can sometimes drive us a little crazy. The problem is that there is a proper distance essential for seeing things. Physical distance from an object determines what we will see. Too far and you can see generalities and context; to close, and what detail there is might be a blur and there's no context. There is an neutral distance where there is some detail yet we can see the relation of the object to its environment. I love the "magnifying glass effect" I get with the telephoto lens when photographing a glorious blossom or budding hawthorn.

Then there are the panoramic pictures of the English landscape or the Jungle hills so difficult to take because they always seem to fall short of the reality. How can you capture that sense of smallness and "creatureliness" that you feel when standing under a great blue sky or see a horizon full of miles of green grass terminate at the field's edge under your feet? Or how can your lens take in the enormity of a waterfall not seen until you are upon it?

I have coped with this problem sometimes by taking a tiny piece of the large picture, a component, looking at its smallest parts rather than trying to describe what is too big to take in. I take a veil of water falling over rock instead of the waterfall, or the hedge row with the field in back of it instead of the field with a bit of hedge row. By doing this I try to let the enormity of what I see speak for itself. After all, that feeling of creatureliness is often a composite feeling, made up of seemingly random views that combine to give a sense of scale, a glimpse of a world here long before and long after us, a world of limitless space that by contrast makes us treasure the slightly squishy mud under our feet, the dry curls of last years grass being quickly overtaken by the lush crown of green sprouting underneath them. It is reassuring to be on the side of the grass and growing things. The "world" is too large and multiple to understand. If we understand that we are creatures of the world, not its creators, the enormity of creation is laid before us in all its richness and complexity. We do not saddle ourselves with an impossible description. We can see with the eyes of a creature. We can see little pieces of creation like a garden or a child or a friend and wonder at them or care for them.

Creatureliness is the same no matter what your age. The feeling is the same one I had when I was five. Time seems to be irrelevant to the concept. In fact time seems to collapse under it. That the feeling can connect the years of your life in a short circuit is part of the wonder I think. Of how many things in this world can you say that?

Liverpool

2009-03-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

We went to Liverpool this weekend to see Maggie and Michael. We met them when they came to Richmond two years ago as part of a committee called the Triangle of Hope. Although we weren't sure exactly where the work of the committee was going, we liked them and wanted to pay them a visit. So off we went on the train through the west countryside through Birmingham to Liverpool .

The great thing about visiting Maggie and Michael where they live is that they had so much to show us and were able to help us understand the meaning of the places in their context. The experience was infinitely richer for this. Maggie's knowledge and involvement in the life of the church in Liverpool, both in her own parish church and in the life of the Cathedral meant that we benefited from her perspective on many things. This ranged from the deeply telling and close relationship between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Bishops and Cathedrals to the whimsical - knowledge of the particularly ornate bathroom facilities of a pub along the way.

Ducking into the symphony hall, an art deco structure on Hope Street as we made our way from one cathedral to the other gave me an opportunity to talk to Michael, Maggie's husband and an architect, about building in Liverpool. This widened to include the fact that Liverpool is full of sculpture and art in unexpected places. The example, a pile of stone suitcases and guitar cases invited us to sit on one of the scattered pieces of "luggage" was right across the street. On the evening before we were driving down the freeway at night as our car passed underneath an arch of sparkling blue lights fitted to an overhanging stainless steel sculpture. What one would mistake at a glance for a man walking down the sidewalk on the Liverpool docks turns out to be a bronze statue, a tromp l'oiele set against the wide and turbulent Mercy river on one side and the blocks of grand imperial architecture of the merchant city that once dwarfed London on the other.

Liverpool Cathedral could be considered a topographic feature of the landscape. Having almost the highest point in Liverpool at its top, the reddish sandstone structure creates its own weather. The wind picks up around the base of the cathedral on a normal day but today, the first sunny day we've had in a long time, the wind was gusting heavily, capping the waves on the Mercy with white foam and making me feel insecure walking up a staircase. After walking through the shadow of the great building for a few minutes we finally gained the great doorway. We retreated out of the gusts into the huge but surprisingly warm space of the cathedral. The wind was put out of mind for awhile while we had lunch and climbed around the multiple levels of the Narthex. Thanks to Maggie's connections and her magic key we were given a special tour of the Cathedral tower. We made some of the 8 plus floor trip using an elevator, but much of the climb was made by climbing winding narrow staircases. As we climbed higher and higher , the wind became the dominant feature again, the sound dwarfing even the huge carillon near the top of the tower.

At first we entered the bell ringers' gallery, an industrial looking space strung together by steel girders with a large wooden stage shaped like a doughnut built in the middle. The ropes for the heavy bells hung down in order around the circle. One rope hung unobtrusively from the center, looped up out of reach. I learned that rope belonged to "Big George," the 14 ton bell rung only on special occasions and never rung in a peal. I also learned that Liverpool Cathedral's ringers currently hold the record for the longest Peal. (4 and a half or 5 hours I think I heard)

Climbing further up the tower, we heard the shrill of the wind whistling through the pierced stone walls of the bell tower. As we entered, we saw the carillon filling the floor space of the tower, but the dim space above it receded like outer space. In what appeared to be the far distance, a staircase zigzagged up the inside wall of the tower to the top. As we walked around and up, the tower itself sang with the wind and I couldn't help imagining what it would sound like with the addition of the bells. It struck me that the sound generated by the bells might actually be stressful to the masonry of the building. This turned out to be true -the sound had shaken some small bits of the masonry loose last year.

I thought that was a great image. The sound of bells, of music, of joy or mourning was more powerful than stone, brick and steel. Transient sounds like the peal of bells seem more alive than the permanent shell of the great building, yet the bells like the people, need it to contain and shelter them and give them a home.

Merton College Evensong

2009-03-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

March 11th, Cuddesdon

Today was cool and mostly cloudy. We trekked into Oxford, trying to find a car park we could afford. We found one off Cowley Street several blocks from the Magdalen bridge. After some exploring and a library visit for Craig, we were to meet at 6:15 at Merton College for evensong. This is the end of Hilary term at Oxford and most of the colleges don't have evensong out of term, so this was our last chance for awhile.

Getting there about 45 minutes early, I took some pictures while the light held, then as the photos got dimmer and dimmer, I gave up. As I walked over small pink and grey cobblestones set in sweeping arcs between rows of flagstones in one courtyard, I caught a glimpse of the green of grass through the stonework of another courtyard. As I walked through the arch, I heard the choir begin to practice in the chapel, so I went in, sitting out of view listening.

When Craig arrived it was time to go into the chapel proper and the music I had heard from a distance now enveloped us. The plainsong seemed to have a physical shape and persistence, holding the hearer in the space of the worship. The singers' clear voices melted together pouring out like liquid and ending soft as a feather into silence.

As the choir members marched out solemnly by twos they skirted the microphones used for the podcast**. The only sound to be heard was their shoes clicking on the floor. I thought how ordinary these young people looked, so different from one another, yet how prodigious was their talent. The singers - each year different - carry on a tradition that has been the hallmark of Anglican/Episcopal worship for centuries. We can hear it now because they and others like them have kept the tradition alive.

(The music and settings we listened to was by Byrd, Tompkins, and Bach. Merton College is home to the Tallis Scholars. For those who like plainsong, or anysong.. this is the group for you... )

**When we looked at the post for the evening service we noticed that it was to be podcast. I went to the Merton College website, and the March 11th evensong wasn't up yet, but the podcast from the month before was there. If you'd like to hear what it sounded like, click on the link on the top to the right and select the podcast mentioned in the body of the paragraph. )

Wool and ink

2009-03-12T02:19:00.000-07:00

I was walking through the covered market and my eye caught them through the glass, Skeins of lovely wool in a fairly unlikely store, a shop run for the benefit of hospice care. At first I passed by, thinking, "That's ridiculous. What on earth would I do with that." Later in the day I passed by the same shop and the wool drew me with a power I do not understand. Chunky purple wool, lovely ash colored grey wool begging for a knitter. I could envision the grey in an Aran sweater, but I wasn't up to that. My ambition was a scarf. Yes - there are scarves available here for 3 pounds each, but somehow that was irrelevant. I succumbed to the impulse and bought 2 skeins of grey and a pair of second hand size 7 metal knitting needles for a pound.

As I chatted with the woman running the shop we laughed because I struggled about buying the needles. I have a drawer full of knitting needles at home. As we were packing, I carried 2 pairs of circular needles half way up the stairs, intending to put them in my suitcase. Thinking I would never have time to knit, I turned around and put them back. I am still kicking myself.

I think you just have to resign yourself to certain habits or foibles. One of mine is forgetting or not remembering how much I like to knit. One of Craig's is underestimating how much he likes to write. He has a penchant for paper and pen. I love the feel of wool on my fingers and the creation of something useful and beautiful out of nothing but raw material and effort. Although I am frequently disappointed and frustrated with the result, I keep trying. Craig loves the feeling of the flow of fountain pen ink on paper and the creation of ideas from knowledge and reflection. From the ideas begun many years ago, he makes many beginnings, but a relatively few results see the light of day or the printing press. But he still keeps trying. Craig can't pass up a stationary store. I can't pass up a wool store. The material begs the activity.

So we go through life, no matter where we are vulnerable to our weaknesses but trying to redeem them. There is some kind of strenghth and hope in there somewhere. The persistence of the habit attests to its strength. Then there is the hope that we will someday make that Aran sweater or write that book. Maybe someday we will.

Land of Narnia

2009-03-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

Oxford is the land of C. S. Lewis. He taught here, met his good friend, J. R. Tolkein here, and married here. He walked for many years over the same slates and cobbles we now walk, met at same pubs, the Lamb and the Flag or the Eagle and Child with the Inklings, a group of writers whose works are now the stuff of legend. C. S. Lewis became a Christian here. He and the other Inklings, he said, represented "mere Christianity," that is they agreed on the basics, but held differing beliefs. Together their collective talent became a river of creativity from which they all benefited. I get goose bumps when I realize that Lewis and Tolkein traveled the same hills that we do and saw the same fields stretching over the horizon. All that separates us is a few years. And a lot of talent.

In honor of St. Peter's Narnia week, we went to evensong at Magdalen College where Lewis taught. The chapel is long and narrow. Dark wood seats line both sides of the choir leading to the altar in front of a stone frieze covered with a grid of figures that goes from the high ceiling all the way to the floor. The stained glass windows, still light at 6 PM, grow dim during the service. I'm sure in his many years here Lewis sat in the same seats and looked at the same altar. As we listened to the plainsong, we thought of everyone at home so busy engaged in bringing Lewis' worlds back to life. He had so much to say. He said it with his pen and his imagination with truth and kindness and a little mystery.

Peace and quiet

2009-03-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

March 10th, Cuddesdon

We arrived in at Heathrow airport west of London at 6:35 AM. We had had dinner and breakfast on the 7 hour flight that had taken us directly north from the equator to England. Landing and going through customs was a breeze. Teeth chattering, we dug our coats out of the checked bag that had mercifully arrived when we did. Taking the bus from the airport to Oxford where we picked up the rental car amounted to the calm before the storm.

Curb! Tree! Curb! I was sitting on the left side of the car shouting warnings as Craig, having had 3 hours of sleep tried to learn how to drive from the right side of the car on the left side of the road remembering how to drive a stick shift, but translating it to his left hand rather than his right. In retrospect it might have been worth the extra 100 pounds to get the automatic. We arrived at our friends house in the late afternoon after having made a few forays (some unintentional) into Oxford.

Did you know that the side view mirrors on some cars collapse? The lane into our friend's house is notoriously narrow. We only hit 2 mirrors. But no damage - thanks to the collapsing. Of course we didn't know that before we hit them. Craig refused to drive again for 2 days.

What struck us about the whole exercise is how something so familiar can be so strange. All you have to do is change one little rule. Drive on the left. What would have been a walk in the park is turned into a white knuckle, hair-raising experience. The other thing that struck me is that no matter how familiar a place is, travel is always disorienting. Somehow you carry the place you came from with you for a few days. It's like your point of reference is far away, and therefore not really useful (even though you still try to use it) Using Ghanaian expectations for travel in the UK isn't really useful, but it takes a few days to develop a new point of reference. I don't understand this. I'm an American, not a Ghanaian, but in the month we lived with our Ghanaian friends, we learned to trust them and looked to them for many things. To a small extent we became like them. Now they were gone and we were on our own. It was like we forgot our old selves and hadn't really invented our new selves yet. Weird.

Now Craig is much more at home driving on the left. Mercifully our friends lent us their Tom Tom. I don't know how we'd do it otherwise. This makes the elbow macaroni streets of home look like child's play.

So now we've settled into our digs in England. The College is set in the countryside greening with early spring. The crocuses are up, and the daffodils won't be far behind. It is surrounded by open fields on the periphery of a tiny village with a wonderful pub. We've made it into Oxford a couple of times, but after the heat and noise of Africa and the anxiety of the first few days here, I think we're feeling like we'd like a little peace and quiet.

This is a good place for peace and quiet.

Flip flops, dreamers, and Sensible Shoes

2009-03-09T04:45:00.001-07:00

When we finally got to the airport in Accra I just left the flip flops in the back of Joseph's car along with the empty Fanta can. Shedding them like a snake skin, they were dusty and flattened with wear. The 7 Cedis I had spent for them had been squeezed out of them long ago, but now I was headed for cooler climes. I figured it was time for Sensible Shoes.

I hadn't really planned on hiking through the jungle to see a waterfall on the day we left. The clothes I was wearing in the morning were going to be the clothes I had to wear on the plane. When we arrived at the reception desk for the Wli waterfall, the guide said it was a 45 minute hike in and a 45 minute hike out. That seemed a little daunting for three reasons. First, it was 1 PM in the afternoon and the sun was hot. Second, we had a long ride back to Accra for our flight. Thirdly, I'm not a hiker and I had no other shoes except my flip flops. But once there, we were committed, so off we set down a fairly level path through the forest along a clear stream running along the jungle floor. We traveled over 9 small bridges along the path through the lush undergrowth. A steep grassy mountainside rose up on one side of the river valley, the forest covering the other steep bank of the canyon through which we walked. As we drew nearer to the falls, the forest thinned and I notice we were walking on a rock ledge covered with a thin layer of sand.

We felt it before we saw it. The air seemed cooler. As we rounded a bend in the path, there it was, curtains of water let loose from a lip of rock high above our heads. The water fell almost silently to a sandy pool nestled at the base of a rocky grotto. Lush green plants clung to the walls of the canyon, the waterfall dwarfing everything around it.

The walk through the jungle had been shady, but even in the relative coolness of the forest, we were sticky and hot. Gusts of misty cool air stirred by the falling water drew us like a magnet toward the pool. Off came the flip flops and I waded into the water up to my shins. Apart from a few flat rocks, the bottom was sandy and soft. As I stood there, feet in the water, I craned my neck, looking upward and saw dozens of bats swooping quickly through the mists where the water first launched from its channel. Then I saw hundreds of bats nestled into the top of the cliff face

No one wanted to leave, but time was passing. Dozens of pastel colored butterflies flew around our feet as we left this oasis of coolness. The hike out didn't seem so long. Along the path we met men chopping wood with machetes and women carrying large bundles of sticks stacked high on their heads. After a lunch of chicken and jollof rice we climbed back into the car.

After our adventures in the north, we headed south toward Accra from where we were to catch our flight to London. As we came closer to the city, the secondary roads became four lane highway. As we approached the airport we took a wrong turn. The person who knew the way had fallen asleep in the back seat of the car and we found ourselves in a crowded market, stalls lining the packed red dirt roadway. The stalls sold everything from food and clothing to shoes and appliances. Every hundred feet or so there was a large scrum of men and boys, their faces all turned facing into the stalls. Those in the back of the crowds were trying to see over the shoulders of those in front of them. It turns out that the Ghana National Team was playing in the African National Tournament. The crowds were gathered around anyone who had a television set or radio. As it was near the end of the game, the concentration was visible in the way the fans were standing and listening. As we sat still, mired in the traffic jam, I became uneasy. Our plane was to leave at 11:30PM, but it was already after 6 and I didn't know how long this might take. Just as I had my moment of unease, Ghana's team scored a goal. A great roar erupted simultaneously from the knots of people around the TVs. Quickly after the goal, Ghana was declared the winner. What had been bonfires of enthusiasm became a conflagration of joy. People who were inching along just stopped their cars. Passengers alighted, horns honked, music blared. As we sat in the eye of the storm, all I could think of was, “Please let me get to the plane on time.”

After some masterful driving by Joseph we reached the airport. Then we said our goodbyes and boarded the plane. Our cabin attendants were performing their last minute checks. A voice came over the sound system saying, “We're going to spray the airplane now. If it bothers you, cover your eyes and mouth for approximately 20 seconds.” In disbelief, Craig and I grabbed whatever we could find to cover our faces and down the aisle they came, one attendant on each side of the plane, spray hissing from the nozzles. After we recovered from the shock we realized that the door had been open to mosquitoes all night. The riot of life to which we had become accustomed, we realized, might be too much for the rest of the world. That's when it hit me. We were leaving. We were leaving the mosquitoes. We were leaving the heat and the stickiness, the thirst and the fear of running out of water. But we were leaving the jungle and lush greenness, too. We were leaving the red earth, the soft air and bright suffused light,. Most of all, we were leaving the dreamers and the dream makers. They showed us a Ghana full promise.

Flip flops were good for Ghana. They got the job done. I don't think dreamers wear Sensible Shoes.

Monkey business

2009-03-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

March 4th

Tafi Atome, Ghana

Our time in Ghana finished with a two day excursion through the part of Ghana near the Togo border. The plan was to tour the mountainous area east of the Volta river. There were several attractions near the regional capitol, Ho and the larger city of Hohoe. Joseph wanted us to see the monkey sanctuary at Tafi Atome and West Africa's tallest waterfall, Wli falls. We traveled from Kumasi to Ho on Tuesday afternoon, arriving at a guest house around 8 or 9 PM. After an early breakfast the next morning we left for the monkey sanctuary, stopping along the roadside to buy 2 bunches of bananas with which to lure the Mona monkeys. We arrived at the reserve after a one and a half hour drive north of Ho, turning down a dirt road stopping in a small settlement.

We pulled up in the shade of a Mango tree. Large-leafed and dark green, its trunk was gnarled and its branches were filled with baby green mangoes. Bamboo benches spread out underneath the tree. After checking in at the reception center and paying the requisite 9 Cedis charged non-Ghanaians, we were told that the walk would take 45 minutes. With our guide, we set off back up the road we had come down. After about 50 yards we came to the entrance to the path into the jungle. Carrying the bananas, the guide made kissing sounds to attract the monkeys. Before we ever stepped off the roadway into the forest, the monkeys came. First a few, then an entire troop of monkeys braved the sight of strangers for the the irresistible yellow bananas. As they grabbed the fruit, they peeled it, breaking off pieces of banana, popping them into their mouths. Some were shy and some fearless. Some carried their prize into the trees and some ate the fruit on the spot. As some monkeys from another troop approached from further up the road the larger monkeys from the troop near us put up their tails and advanced into the roadway to fend off the invaders. We were unaware of the two large monkeys who had climbed far out on some tree branches above our heads. They were making high pitched barking sounds whose meaning was clear even to us non-monkeys. After the invaders had cleared off and the bananas were almost gone, we were still on the roadway, not even having gone into the jungle. One of us asked, “Can we still go into the jungle to see the monkeys?” Our guide looked at us quizzically and said, “There won't be any monkeys in the jungle.” When we asked why she said, “Because they came here instead.” Duh.

It turns out that the Mona Monkey is revered in this part of the forest. Once viewed as sacred messengers to the turtles, the monkeys were decimated by religious and other conflicts. This reserve at Tafi Atome was established by the Ghanaian government to rebuild the population and protect the monkeys. The Mona monkeys are the only primates who live in this part of the forest. No Mona monkey has ever been taken from the reserve. In fact there is a legend that an Englishman once took one of the monkeys to England to keep, but that monkey, the story goes, came back to the forest from which it came and none has ever left again.

A bit hungry, we snacked on the left-over bananas and climbed back into the car for our trip to the water fall. Knowing the uncertainty of travel, it was hard not to worry about getting to the airport on time, but the forest was so beautiful and the drive so interesting, I soon stopped fretting. (To be continued)

Ten things I have learned

2009-03-06T03:06:00.000-08:00

March 1st, Kumasi

When we first arrived in Ghana, I didn't know what to expect - what was "proper behavior in church." Craig has preached in a different church every Sunday. Now that I've had a few churches to compare, I'm feeling more comfortable. Here are ten things I have learned.

1. Anglican Church services in Ghana are Long. Three and a half hours. And that's if there's nothing else going on.
2. There's always something else going on.
3. And they're very formal. 16 acolytes.
4. When I feel hot, I look at Craig wearing a clergy shirt, alb, chausable and stole and I stop feeling sorry for myself.
5. Some parishes are full of life and others are stiff. Not so different from home, really. You can always tell by who claps with the music. Unfortunately this can be so much fun that it can make the service longer.
6. Most churches use sound systems. Young people like to turn the amplifiers up high.
7. They use lots of incense, sometimes 2 or 3 thuribles going at the same time. I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be enough smoke until you can't see the altar.
8. Fund raising is a weekly and essential part of every priests' and bishops' job. They are very plain about it. At the offertory you march to the front of the church and place your donation into the collection box pew by pew (accompanied by music of course.) They might pass the plate too. And then there may be a special collection where you march to the front again, sometimes according to the day of the week you were born, competing to see which day's group gave the most. After the announcements at the end of the service, the Anglican Youth might have a fund raising session. They you can go home. Churches give 50 or 60 percent of their income for the work of the diocese.
9. Anglican clergy and leadership shoulder a huge responsibility. They are deeply involved in the life of their congregations. They "wear many hats," civic and religious. They are highly respected and can get things done that other people can't. People look to them for leadership and direction.
10. They make me sit up front. I am honoured, but you know me....

Saying Goodbye

2009-03-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

February 28th, Cape Coast

Today Hannah told me, "Now you are a real Ghanaian lady!" because I danced with her in chapel... a kind of slow shuffling walk really. Hannah is one of the first two women that will graduate from St. Nicholas this June. Never without a smile, it seems you can read her whole being on her face. There is a depth of expression beyond happiness or joy. There is wisdom and maturity and generosity of spirit. She is a comforting person to be around. When she was moving this morning with the music, she allowed herself to simply be.

For 3 weeks we have lived and shared life with the students and faculty at the Seminary. During a going away ceremony for us yesterday, the Dean said Craig had come as a missioner and that we were part of St. Nicholas now. One part of St. Nicholas that will always stay with us is a song known by every Anglican and sung at the offertory at almost every service. The only problem for us is that it sung in Twi and we wanted someone to translate for us. At the end of the goodbye ceremony, Craig asked the students if they could make the song for him again. What began as a demonstration quickly became a summary of all our time here. Out of the context of the church service itself, it was sung for joy. Having an asymmetrical rhythm punctuated by double claps and accompanied by drums, cast iron "bells" and tambourines, no one can really stand still when it's played. So when Hannah stepped out from her chair in a slowly rocking walk it was really no surprise and it only seemed natural to join her.

So there we were, 2 generously proportioned middle aged ladies "walking" with the music that they made for us - a fleeting gift, loud in the mind and alive in the heart. I saw Craig clapping with smile filling his face and then I saw him wipe his eyes. Then he didn't bother. Neither did I.

Food comes from Somewhere

2009-02-27T01:22:00.000-08:00

One thing that being here has taught me is that food comes from somewhere. It doesn't come wrapped in cellophane from supermarket shelves or mysteriously appear in a box or can. People who have grown up on farms understand this, but most people these days are city dwellers or suburban residents and so it is easy to forget.

Our neighbor downstairs told me that the turkey I naively named Henry because he gobbles away every morning is to be Easter dinner for his children when they come home from boarding school. So now when I hear the crow of the rooster outside our window at 4 AM (dueling roosters actually, one in front and one in back), I resign myself, as I know that he is soon to be some one's Sunday dinner.

The fish we eat at lunch were caught by the some of the hundreds of fishermen and women that I see lining the beach at Elmina. In the morning, you can see the fishermen floating in log canoes about 500 yards off shore - casting their huge blue nets. Later in the afternoon, families begin to arrive with pails and basins perched on their heads to help with the catch. They sit in the palm groves until it's time to haul in the net, long lines of people tugging on a single rope in unison. Afterward, everyone helps with cleaning the fish. Some of the fish get salted and dried in the sun on large bamboo racks and some may be sold fresh. I know this because I saw them. So no matter how attached I get to the little goats in the pen by our clothesline, I know they have a practical and life-giving purpose. We are immersed in and surrounded by that which sustains us.

The problem is... I love those goats. They are tiny...and cute. They have an overbite. They are curious. They hold my gaze when I look at them as if to say, “Where's my dinner?” or “Would you pass me some of that elephant grass over there?” The white goat had tiny white twins but one died. The black goat had had her kid in the week before we came. A tiny soft gray new creature with a black stripe down its back, you can hear the baby goat's “me-e-e-e-e-” when it's time to eat.

As we walked through the market yesterday there was a man half leading, half carrying a shaggy brown goat up the road. He had fashioned a rope out of twisted rushes and made a halter lead from it. He was walking along quickly and purposefully. When the goat veered off course, the man never broke his stride, but just picked him up by his “handle” and set him back down along his path. Goats roam free here, even in the city, so seeing the goat restrained in this way was unusual. Craig said, “That's the last you'll see of that goat.” I realized he was right. The man was taking him into the market to be sold or killed and dressed so his family could eat.

I am not a vegetarian, so I have to accept that this is where my food comes from. But it changes my perspective. Animals, albeit not willingly, give up their lives so we can eat. Craig said something that comes to my mind as I fret about this. When you say grace over a meal, you are thanking the Creator, but you are also thanking the creature that gave its life so we could have food. There is the price I paid for the food at the grocery store. But there is another price more important to remember – a much higher price paid by the animal. So there is great sadness and at the same time so much gratitude - one with the other, inseparable if we are to be honest. And why should we be otherwise? So when I say grace over a meal – not only do I thank the Creator of all things, but I remember His creature and acknowledge its life, understanding that it is by God and the world He created I am sustained.

Fanta

2009-02-25T11:44:00.000-08:00

The new word in our vocabulary is Fanta, the fizzy drink in a bottle or a can visible at a hundred yards due to its neon orange color. I'm not sure how they get that color and I'm not sure I want to know, but to a traveling person with traveling problems, if you get my drift, Fanta is a Godsend. Where nothing else appeals to the appetite, the libation holds powerful curative properties. Having an almost mesmerizing attraction for us, we dole out the magical elixir in small doses like medicine and it never ceases to deliver on the promise of a settled tummy, if for only a little while. It has become the cure-all for everything, sort of like Windex, but better tasting. In fact, few things send Craig into transports of joy like Fanta.

On the look-out for Fanta, Craig spotted the first bottle on a foray into Cape Coast. A touristy cafe advertised drinks. As we looked over the menu, we spotted the cases of empty Fanta bottles stacked by the door. On inquiring we discovered that yes, indeed, Fanta was on the menu. We decided we'd split one because of the sugar whallop, but that was a great drink-cold where nothing else was and hydrating for the moment. We drank our Fanta with the obligatory straw and finished it off in nothing flat, returning the empty bottle to join its mates in the case by the door. We never even sat down.

Since then I've discovered a tiny shop outside the gates that sells the drink, but I've cleaned her out for the moment. The guard at the school gate said one of the students sells Fanta as a side-line, but I haven't seen any Fanta selling students yet. Nancy, our wonderful Matron produced 7 bottles miraculously one day. We have been rationing those bottles for our last week here in Cape Coast.

I wonder if Fanta counts as a fruit. Sort of like ketchup counts as a vegetable.

Polyester is for shopping bags

2009-02-23T05:52:00.000-08:00

I've written a lot about the heat. There are many things more worth mentioning, but there is nothing more stressful for us in adapting to our physical surroundings. And you have to learn to adapt to your physical surroundings before you can do much else, so please forgive the frequent obsession with the heat in the blog. It's great to hear from you all and we appreciate the encouragement and sometimes even the smiling faces on the blog follower photos!

So far I haven't worn many of the things I brought. Granted, I didn't expect to need the turtleneck five degrees north of the equator. But I thought that maybe the knit top would work, or the skirt. Let's face it, so far my wardrobe planning has been a disaster. Now I'm not willing to pan it completely – we still have 3/4ths of the way to go, but I think the writing is on the wall... I should have listened to my brother. He said no matter what you do, you'll forget something. Well how about everything. It wasn't so much about forgetting as about choosing the wrong things. Even the non-cotton red and black dress I brought won't work here because in Ghana, you only wear red and black to funerals...... on Saturdays. So if I wore that dress, which I wouldn't, on a week day people would look at me oddly and if I wore it on a Saturday, they would ask me who died.

I've analyzed the problem. There were two failures here. The first was a failure of imagination on my part. I never imagined that I could be this uncomfortable all the time in clothes that I had worn with great comfort in fairly warm weather. The second and most important miscalculation was made in ignorance. I had no idea how important it was that clothing be able to breathe and wick moisture away from your body. I knew cotton was preferable in the heat, but I had no idea how critical it was. I now know that polyester and nylon are the enemy and should be reserved for shopping bags and sailboat sheets.

Students here wear full length white cassocks to class and to services, morning, noon, and night. Faculty teach in them. Indeed faculty sometimes leave campus in them when they go to take care of their churches. They are much more comfortable if they are made of cotton. No washing machines, either. They are immaculately clean and white, and it's all done by hand.

I went in search of cotton clothing on my first day in Cape Coast. I found an overpriced and not very flattering blouse and an equally unflattering granny skirt. I should have been tipped off about the blouse. I entered the only air conditioned store I have been to in Cape Coast, then or since. The racks were distinctly Euro looking. I bought Craig a cotton Ghanaian shirt whose repeating stamped design was a word, a symbol really, that I was told meant “freely given” I thought that sounded alright. But when Craig put it on, our two jolly flat mates, members of the faculty here, intimated it might have something more to do with “Luv” than any pretty idea or altruism. Oh well, we're cool now.

The rain here is nothing compared to the rain in Cameroon

2009-02-20T10:43:00.001-08:00

I saw a pillar of water the other day.

It was night actually– about 1 AM and I knew it was raining. It was the sound that woke me up. Over the whir of our ceiling fan, the sound was not the patter pat of drops hitting the ground, but the hiss of water poured from a bucket. The rain came as a welcome relief from the previous two days of punishing heat and humidity. The sky simply couldn't hold any more water, so when the sun set and the air cooled, down the rain came in a torrent. There was no wind blowing to distract the water from its headlong trip to the earth. Straight and quick as an arrow, sheets of rain came down. Not a drop of rain hit the sill, so mercifully we did not have to close the windows. The only thing we could see was the street lamp outside our window, its shape lost, but its light diffused to a vague orange glow.

I crossed to the back of the flat to look in the opposite direction and saw dimly and at quite a distance from the building, a pillar of water standing straight and disappearing into the night sky. It didn't move, but sort of scintillated in the light cast from our window. It was just puzzling enough that I woke up a bit, moving to another window to get a better look. I hoped the downpour wasn't hurting the animals in the pen below, the new mama goat and her kid, the chickens and the turkey and his mate. After I had ascertained that the column of water was well off to the side, I concentrated on the source of the strange sight.

Now I've seen downspouts before, but they usually run down the end of a building, depositing their water in a drain or onto a back splash that leads the water away from the foundation. When it rains at home, there is a pleasant gurgle of water running down from the roof gutters, but there was no way one of my downspouts could handle this rain. The only thing I could figure is that in this part of the world, they didn't bother with the “down” part of the downspout. Water from the roof collected in channels that launched the rain like a water cannon far into the night. While the rain was heavy, the water acted like a stream suspended between the spout and the earth. The next day as I was coming back from the hill, I noticed the long spidery spouts sticking far out from the roof like the naked spines of a blown umbrella. I hadn't noticed them before.

After all the excitement, I went back to bed and for the first time here, I needed covers. The following day was cooler and breezy. I was glad to know that such a day could come. The students, although happy for the relief, began recalling how a month ago it had gotten as low as the 70's and everyone fussed that they weren't equipped for the cold. It had happened during the Harmattan - the dry hot wind that comes from the Sahara bringing with it hot days and cool nights. I thought of Samuel and his first overcoat and everyone back home in February weather....

A day or two later we were talking with some teachers. They said the rain here was nothing compared to the rain in Cameroon..

Fufu

2009-02-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

The first thing many Ghanaians say when they come back to Ghana is, "I really missed fufu." Like mashed potatoes or biscuits and gravy, fufu is comfort food and the only ones who can make it right are those who love it as much as you do. If you saw a portion of fufu you might think someone had made bread dough and placed the satiny ball in an over sized bowl to rise before baking. In southern Ghana, a "light soup" is poured over the top and fufu sits in its bowl like a rotund butter colored island rising up through the lake of fragrant stew.

Eating comfort food in Ghana is no different from eating comfort food at home and even the most proper Ghanaians eat fufu with their fingers. I think this is to honor the way that it is made and its status as home cooking -like fried chicken or chips and salsa or corn on the cob. Before the fufu is eaten, a bowl of water is passed for rinsing the fingers of your eating hand. Then you pinch off a bit of the fufu, scooping up some of the stew with it. Some of the stew is absorbed by the fufu, so at the end all is finished.

The making of fufu takes special equipment and teamwork. Fufu is made with a large mortar and pestle. The pestle is made from a tree limb or sapling about as tall as a person and as big around as can be comfortably grasped by an adult hand. The pole is smooth, stripped of its bark and pounded on one end to look like a frayed mushroom cap. This is the end that crushes and mashes the vegetables into just the right consistency, working them until the dough sticks together and forms a smooth ball. The mortar is a large flat bottomed bowl mounted on a low stand. One person, standing above the mortar, pounds cooked wedges of cassava and chunks of plantain together with the pole while a second person sitting on a low stool next to the mortar moves the vegetables around the bowl in between strokes. As the vegetables turn to paste the person sitting next to the bowl gathers and folds the dough, adding water as needed, until the mass turns into the smooth dense food ready to be called fufu. The person sitting beside the bowl has only a tiny window of time to stir the dough before the beating stick comes down again.

Making fufu takes teamwork--and not your ordinary teamwork. The person making the fufu is most often the woman in charge of making the meal. The person pounding the dough is often a son or husband, student or helper happy to help with its creation. There is a great deal of trust between the person folding the dough and the person pounding with the pestle. The strokes are not anemic. They are full of force and once begun are irretrievable. If the stick isn't brought down in the same spot or in an even rhythm, there is danger of crushing the fingers of the person folding the dough. Yet if the stick were not brought down sharply, it would take forever to make something that already takes awhile to make. So together the pounder and the folder develop a rhythm and a functional trust, stopping occasionally to rest.

Like many simple things we do in life, there is often a lesson within them. We share and trust every day. But the sharing and the trusting are so woven into the fabric of our life we are unaware of them. Seeing them in the light of an unfamiliar activity makes me think. Sharing and trusting in most cases is incomplete. We share only so much as we can afford without discomfort. We trust only to the degree that we are willing to expose ourselves to risk of a bad consequence. So when we do not share, are not trusting or are not worthy of trust, we are perhaps made uneasy, but the cause of the unease may not be obvious. Surrounded by familiar things and routines, the chinks in our armor are not easy to see. They are lost in the gloss of the unremarkable routine surrounding them.

But when I see one person risk having her fingers crushed, trusting the person holding the pestle not to falter or mis-aim, the consequence of a mismatch between trust and fear is direct and clear. I know it's only fufu, but it makes me think about what complete trust in God might look like. If my life with God is a work in progress, and if God will never falter, why should I snatch my hand away too quickly? What do I risk by mistrusting? Moving from familiar surroundings to an unfamiliar place, the hows and the whys of life aren't so obvious. Yet in our relationships we all recognize joy and can point to it. Maybe joy is in the life of freedom God gives us to trust him completely without worrying, to work with God at making a life without fear.

Ama Comes out of her Shoes

2009-02-17T14:50:00.000-08:00

February 15^th, the Second Sunday before Lent, Elmina

Ama was born on a Saturday. In Ghana everybody has a day-name. I was born on a Saturday, so my day-name is Ama. We are twins, except that I am almost a half century older than she is. Ama is a slip of a girl. At 7 or 8, she is the youngest of five children. She has the inquisitive and winning smile of her father and the beauty and graciousness of her mother.

The first time I saw Ama, she was playing with her brother and sister. Standing on the wall in the shade of her back porch calling after them, the impression I had and still have of Ama is one of perpetual motion. Not fidgety or anxious, she is weightless like a feather. Unlike a feather, she has direction and purpose, not all of it clear. There is some internal spirit rather than logic that moves Ama, She moves without regard to the ground under her feet and that is why she comes out of her shoes.

There was the time she and her sister carried an impossibly heavy aluminum wash basin full of wash water by its handles from the front of the house to the back porch. Stopping every 10 yards or so to rest and giggle, they finally neared their goal. Once Ama reached the cement, her feet lifted out of her sandals without breaking the rhythm of her steps. I didn't see them come off; one second they were on, and the next they weren't. That was all. Her will and and the momentum of her load propelled her forward and the sandals were holding her back. So they stayed there atop the earth, each sandal a memory of a girl who, rather than wearing them, had passed through them on her way. When she reached the safety of the smooth cement of her porch, she didn't need them really, except to protect from stones.

Craig and I are staying with the faculty and students at here during our month in Ghana. The seminary is a haven like Ama's back porch where we are known and where we can come to know not only the students and faculty, but a culture and way of life unfamiliar to us. As Craig teaches and as we venture into the town, we learn more and more. Many times we learn by being disabused of our assumptions. Although everyone here is here to learn and teach, it is the layer underneath our common pursuit from which we learn the most. We are child-like in that we do not understand the timing and phrasing of words, the distance between people, the seriousness of small things, and irrelevance of big ones. It is those things that make us conscious of how fast we at home move and how we barely listen to one another. How we are only loosely connected to our families by Ghanaian standards and there are few ties to bind us to the place where we were born.

I hope that one day Craig and I will be seen not so much as the foreigners in the midst of them, but that the momentum of our common burden will propel us forward and we, like Ama, will simply come out of our shoes.

It's not Walmart

2009-02-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

Where Americans are used to large stores full of shelves stocked with an infinite variety of shiny new merchandise, Ghanaians shop in streets full of open air markets packed with an infinite variety of tiny stalls. Carts parked on the sidewalks make it difficult to walk there so the crowds walk on the roadway dodging honking taxis. I love the carts that sell used shoes hung on strings falling like a beaded curtain - each shoe unique -brightly colored high heels, neon colored sequined sneakers, and sandals all blowing in the breeze. The markets continue everywhere you look. A red dirt street off to the right is lined as far as the eye can see with farmers sitting next to their sacks and piles of green hued oranges. Further down the street, we see glimpses of market tables and awnings covered with food through an eyelet of an opening between two 19th century stone buildings. As we pass through the slot, a narrow path winds between stalls packed so claustrophobically close together that their roofs touch overhead. The women sit with their wares. Some of them smile at us, some ignore us or speak Twi which we can't understand. As we thread our way along, 3 children run headlong and laughing around our legs out toward the eyelet opening through which we had entered. At every turn, grain and beans, meat and vegetables, brilliant red palm nuts and pale yellow fragrant parched corn are mounded or stacked or spread out to sell. We come to a fork in the path. One way leads deeper into the bazaar and the other back to the street by a different way than we had come. A woman resting her head on the table in front of her never moves. Her wood and burlap display is covered with palm nuts so brilliantly red and purple they seemed magnetic.

I was feeling the heat and sun so Craig and I made for the street. The pressing, riotous profusion of smells and colors gave way to the relative calm and openness of the street. I hadn't realized how still the air in the bazaar was until we were out on the sidewalk again. Craig was ready to keep walking through the city, one thing making him more curious for the next. I told Craig I was done. Too much sun, too much heat and not enough water... We flagged a Taxi to take us the mile and a half back to the Seminary. Eventually we got there but not before we had gone to the wrong part of the city, had a 5 minute discussion with 3 perfect strangers, one of whom was able to understand us and explained our needs to the driver. I'm not sure if the driver was irritated or if he was just trying to get some breeze going in the car, but the weaving darting taxi ride back to the Seminary would have made a New York Taxi driver proud.

The Mighty Wind

2009-02-13T15:13:00.001-08:00

The electricity went out this afternoon. I looked up and the ceiling fan just got slower and slower. I was out the door to tell Agoage before it came to a stop. All I could think was, "I can't live without a ceiling fan."

Today was a scorcher, even for Ghana. The man who never goes without his shirt went without his shirt. The fellows who never wear shorts wore shorts. Everything just seemed to sag or scorch in the heat. Even our friend Jared (yes, the one from the Bayous of Louisiana) who came over from Salt Pond with his friend Lashawnda was looking a tetch peaked. He had been volunteering in the Seminary's computer lab trying to update their systems. There is no air conditioning, so the temperature is made hotter by the machines, with only the ceiling fan and windows to cool things off. He came over to the flat to visit. He didn't look well. He worried me. He said they were going to splurge and stay in Elmina that night in a place that had air conditioning and a pool. I think he will probably get in that pool and never come out.

As for the humidity, I'll make it simple: I was making a pattern. I creased a piece of newspaper. When I opened out the paper to cut along the crease, I couldn't find it. Enough said.

So Craig and I went seeking breeze. We found it on the back porch of the school kitchen. The kitchen sits on top of the Seminay hill. From the cement porch, the openly forested hillside falls away steeply for about 50 yards to a lagoon. It's covered with tropical plants, trees and vines, along with litter, some chickens, and and a grey waste water drain. A mighty wind blows up that hillside off the water and through the trees cooling and drying whoever stands at the top. So we stood there, sort of spreading our arms like an Anhinga spreads its wings. Then we simply sat on the wall. Children played on the back porch. A few of the students were sitting nearby in the shade of the doorway to the recreation hall/garage. After awhile we got up and started walking back to our flat. As we walked back down the hill, it got slightly warmer. All of a sudden I noticed I was walking alone. Craig had stopped about 12 yards behind me. I said, "You're going back, aren't you?" He didn't say anything but he was looking a little wistful. We turned around and back we went for one more dose of coolness.

When we got back to the flat, I opened the door with trepidation, expecting to see a motionless fan. But wonder of wonders, it was spinning away.

The Door of No Return

2009-02-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

Today we went to Elmina Castle, where many of the slaves traded to the Americas and Europe made there last stop on the African continent. To get to the castle we drove along a touristy stretch of palm lined beach road. Perched at the end of a sandy point, the sun-baked whitewashed castle that seemed more like part of the land mass than a building. Entrance to the 3 story castle was made by going through an archway at the end of a drawbridge over a now-dry moat. The breezy entry hall let to an open courtyard. High bright white walls rose up around the brick and stone pavement. Stairs and the dark shadows of windows and doors pierced the walls at regular intervals. In front of us were the doorways to the warehouses. The stairs to the second floor mounted up in one corner and led to the living and working areas for the free occupants of the Castle. The spacious Governor's apartment was perched on the third floor, getting the best breeze and view from the ocean.

The Portugese built Elmina castle after finding the area fertile trading ground for ivory and gold. Elmina actually means "'The Mines" in a vernacular corruption of the Portugese, referring to the gold discovered here. As first the Portugese, then the Dutch and then the English passed through Elmina Castle, each left their mark on the building and on the people. All of them were businessmen. As profit from one commodity was outstripped by another, the more lucrative commodity, slaves, attracted traders both from within West African Society and from Europe and the Americas. As there was no money, slaves were commonly created by intertribal warfare. Captives could be sold to the European traders for desirable goods brought in on the boats. When there weren't enough war captives to sell, African traders basically "minted" more trading power by raiding other villages and capturing people to sell.

The Elmina dungeons held 1000 souls, many of whom died before ever seeing the boat. So the warehouses that once held ivory and gold became warehouses that held human beings who had been stripped of their freedoms, their comfort, and often, their life. I say "held" because I lack the word to describe what must have been. The mens' dungeon was grim enough, but the smell in the womens' dungeon is still so strong that, as our guide paused to speak, I could not stand inside it.

Every two months the boat would come. The slaves would be herded out through the narrow "Door of No Return" onto a flooded bit of beach at high tide into waiting rowboats. When the slaves boarded the sailing ship, they were shackled to the floor of the hold both by their arms and legs. Many died on the trans-Atlantic trip. Those who survived were thought to be stronger and more fit for work.

There was one sight which gave me hope. As we walked through the dungeons toward the "Door of No Return," I saw some wreaths propped against the opposite wall. One was a pink heart shaped wreath, the other a darker roundish wreath. The wreaths looked like a couple, one a girl and one a boy. The guide told us these were placed here not for those who died, but by those who came back. The descendants of Africans who were carried to other shores have been coming back to Ghana, and when they do, they walk back through the "Door of No Return." They walk back into the darkness from the beach where their ancestors were taken away. And against that wall they place a wreath of remembrance and homecoming.

Don't Look Down

2009-02-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

Today we went to Kakum National Park about 33 miles north of Cape Coast. They have the only canopy walk in Africa according to our guide book. I think the guidebook is old. We considered our options when we got to the Park headquarters - Nature walk for 4 hours or canopy walk for 1 hour. It was about 11 AM, the average humidity there is 90%, and the temperature was in the high 80's or low 90's. Hmmm. Let me think. We took the canopy walk. We also had to consider the kindness of the dean who had lent us his (air conditioned) truck and driver for the trip. So the shorter session seemed better all around.

Except for height thing.

Walking on a rope bridge slung between the tops of the rainforest trees was a little intimidating. After walking on seven of them, you get to feel like an old hand. There's always that first wobble when you step off the platform, and the wobble just before you get back up to the next platform ....I learned to step down slowly and not to panic in the middle when the whole thing swayed. The trick, the guide told us, was to put one foot in front of the other. He said, "if you don't like heights, don't look down. " Jared, a young man from Louisiana visiting Ghana for the first time was with us. He is an outdoorsman and mountaineer. He made everything look easy, but he was gracious enough not to make us feel like old fogies.

Being in the tree tops was amazing. On one huge tree there was an I-95 of ants. They were very orderly, staying to the right on the way up and on the way down. It was a long trip for the ants as the trees can get to be 60 or 70 meters tall. They live in the branches and go to the forest floor to get food and water.

All in all I'm glad I went. The views were breathtaking. I felt brave for having done it and I learned something about this lovely country we are visiting. Watching Craig as he moved along the walkways just looking around was good to see. We got lots of pictures. It's time for Compline now. We've been away for a week, but it seems like a long time...

Donkoto

2009-02-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

(From Saturday, February 7th, sometimes I don't have internet)

Father Joseph took us to one of his villages. Its name is Donkoto. The name means "All is Love" in Twi, the Ashanti language in the area. We traveled about 2 hours west of Kumasi along an amazingly good road, turning off onto red dirt roads for about 20 minutes before we arrived. This is where the road ended. The village is small, having no electricity. The women take turns pumping water from a well in the middle of town. The village is a poor farming village, growing oranges, plantains, and cocoa. There is an old broken down church in the middle of town which was the first Anglican church in these parts, having been built in 1927. The foundation shifted and one wall fell in. The Anglican church runs a school in the town, but not all children attend school. Some cannot afford even the free school. Some people just don't send their children. The Anglican church puts schools in many many places where there would otherwise be none and most Anglican priests are school administrators as well as pastors and worship leaders.

We went to see the Chief of the village led there by Joseph and accompanied by all the men and women who greeted us and about 30 very excited children. I had our new camera around my neck and was taking lots of pictures, which they really liked. We sat with the chief. The first thing Ghanaians want to know is "Why have you come?" This is very basic. Fr. Joseph explained that we were trying to learn about Ghana and West Africa. I don't know what else he said because the group that had gathered was speaking Twi, but the gist was that the village needed help, especially a laptop computer. This town will not have electricity for several years, so I don't know how they were planning to charge it, but since this is Ghana, I'm sure they will find a way. Ghanaians don't worry about potential problems, they just solve them as they go along. We gave the chief a bookmark from the national cathedral and an Obama button. It wasn't what he wanted, but Joseph talked to him and encouraged him. All the need made us feel the inequalities between us and the people of the village.

Joseph gave the villiage money for cement and sand to help rebuild their church. He had given them some Cedis to buy a load of sand, and part of our purpose in coming today was to make sure the sand had been delivered. Today Joseph gave them money for 9 bags of cement, saying "They just need a little encouragement." With the sand and cement they can begin to make blocks for the church. I asked him how much it would cost to make the whole building. He said, "about 10,000 Cedis (about 7,500 dollars.) I realized that 10 of my cameras could have paid for a whole church. I try not to get overwhelmed. Maybe the photos from the camera can help do just that.

Make a Joyful Noise

2009-02-10T22:14:00.000-08:00

I have awoken this morning as I have for last two mornings to the sound of Morning Services being said and sung by the students in the chapel of the seminary. The hymns are sung from the psalter, so you have to remember the melody, but no one will notice if you make a mistake because they are accompanied by drums and tamborines. The rhythms are unfamiliar and the cadence very rapid but the songs are sung with joy.

The community of St. Nicholas is an island of peace in a hectic and crowded world, serving not only the Church in Ghana, but Togo, Cameron, Nigeria, and other countries as well. 40 students and 5 full time faculty, along with some visiting faculty live and work here. They are mostly men, with 2 women, one of whom lived in Alexandria, Virginia for some time. The students wear cassocks to class and to services even in this heat, and live a very disciplined life, going to lecture all day after Morning mass, ending with Evening prayer and Compline almost every day. The students are happy this month because the dean excused them from Evening prayers on Tuesdays and Thursdays while Craig and I are here so that Craig could give a series of Lectures on those evenings. Last night was his first lecture. The topic was "Virtue Ethics" which is a really interesting and quite ancient way of doing ethics. He taught for an hour or more, explaining the ethic's history and content in a clear and accessible way that I really enjoyed. I see him preach all the time, but never get to hear him teach, so this was a real treat. You think you know everything about someone..

Today we go to visit one of the national forests. There is another American named Jared from Louisiana who is visiting in a near by town and he will come with us. The Dean has arranged for someone to drive us and show us around. We are very fortunate to be so well cared for.

It is already heating up and the sun is not even up yet . I hear the ending hymns, which means I better get up. Things start early around here. The noise of the service resounds loudly in this part of the town, waking the roosters by the kitchen and the turkey in the pens under our bathroom window. Both began crowing and gobbling as soon as the first drum beats sounded about an hour ago. The turkey will gobble all day long. I've named him Henry, since he seems to be part of every conversation I have. "Hi, how are you? (gobble)"

Accra to Kumasi

2009-02-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

(From February 5th, 6th, and 7th) As we were flying I couldn't help but think of what it must have been like to travel in other times. Where our flight took 14 hours, steamships took 4 days to cross the Atlantic. Passengers had more time to interact, things were less cramped. An effort was made to make the trip pleasant. The space between where you left and where you were going was measured in time of days, not hours. Four days of looking at a landless ocean made the time difference less relevant. Travelers had four days to get accustomed to the idea that they were in the midst of change, having left one place and anticipating the new territory ahead. I imagine the process was much the same as it was for us, of packing and leaving, arriving and reorienting. Just slower.

We arrived in Accra on the night of the 5th late in the evening. Hot and Humid even at 11 PM, the weather made us feel ridiculous carrying our overcoats as we steered our way through customs. The ATM didn't work, the forex was closed, but no matter. As we passed out of the terminal onto the sidewalk we saw a crush of people lined up against barricades, some holding signs with the names of passengers. We were hoping to find our sign soon, which we did. Joseph our friend had waited a long time with his driver Assemoi to meet us at the airport. He said "I thought you were not coming!" I'm glad he waited. Various people took our bags, not all of them invited, expecting to be rewarded for touching the suitcase. I just ducked and ran (slowly) It was a little overwhelming. Joseph installed us at our hotel and arranged to meet us the following morning for the trip to Kumasi.

The following morning we packed our bags and began the long drive north to Kumasi, a city of about 2 million. I don't know if there is a stop light in either Accra or Kumasi. I haven't seen one, or if I did, no one was paying any attention to it. The road from Accra to Kumasi is under construction and crowded, so ramps lead to short sections of paved road with redirected traffic and pavement gives way to packed red dirt road pitted with ruts and bumps. Miles and many jangled nerves later we were out of the construction and on a reasonable section of road which periodically disappeared again into construction zones and rutted dirt roadbed. We stopped and ate when we were half way to Kumasi. We were overjoyed to land in our hotel near the Stadium. We never did get hot water in the bathroom. Cold water never felt so good!

The next morning, Joseph told us that the Trinity Church Foundation was sponsoring a consultation of African Bishops and we were to go and be observers. The Diocese of Kumasi and Bishop Sarfo were the hosts for the conference. We arrived, sitting behind the King of the Ashanti's son in traditional dress. There were representatives of Trinity Church in the US, an order of nuns from Ghana, their Prioress from England, representatives of the womens' organizations of the Diocese. And of course, there were Bishops from all over Africa, one of them from Kenya. We spoke of Samuel and found that the Bishop had seen Samuel on his St Peter's motorbike. He was well. It's a small world.

Suspended Animation

2009-02-07T11:59:00.000-08:00

(From February 5th) I'm sitting in terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. We've had a remarkably pleasant if cramped flight over the Atlantic fromWashington. As we boarded I was dismayed to walk by the comfortable looking sleeping couches on the way to my coach seat. British Airways tries to elevate coach class by calling it "World Traveler." We had the window and middle seat in a bank of three across. We slept because it was night time. Also because we had wine with dinner. The little TV screen in front of me kept me informed of our loacation, altitude, speed, time and outside temperature. I found that comforting. Trying to keep your wits about you is tough on a trip. We kept our watch on Washington time so we could keep schedule of our medicine times. It was a good point of reference and reminder of the great distances we were traveling. It was odd to me to think that the trip to London and the trip to Accra take the same amount of time but in only one case does the time change (Accra is straight south of London)

Before we left and during the flight I noticed so many different languages and manners of dress - not a big deal for Washington, but it still struck me. What struck me was the thought that when you're traveling away from your own country, the playing field levels. The status of "traveler" supercedes any other citizenship. For the moment, everyone is a citizen of the plane. Everyone's status is changing from native to visitor or visitor to native. The state of traveling is a state of change. Change that can take hours, weeks, or months depending on your technology. If you're Scottie, seconds. For some it takes a lifetime.

Packing

2009-02-03T09:24:00.001-08:00

Oh my goodness. How do you pack a life into 3 suitcases? Editing has never been my forte. Editing has never been a gift that either of us possess. Amazingly enough, trips are one of the things that allows us to edit pretty well. There is a clearly defined period of time for which to plan. There are specific places to visit. There's not a lot of time to waste. You don't get bored. The only plan is a short term plan. What a relief! However, 4 months is verging on the long term, hence my trepidation. I guess if I think of it as 2 two month trips, it will seem less indeterminate. Still have to pack those suitcases, though.

Another thing about leaving a life behind, even for a few days, is the feeling of a fresh start, a life unencumbered by the routine and "stuff" in our lives. Instead of wondering what to keep, what to save and what to give away, you just leave your stuff. Kind of like dying, except you get to come back. The same thing goes for worries. Either you took care of them the best you could, you don't have time to think about them, there's nothing you can do about them, or they don't matter as much as you thought they did.

So if you don't have your stuff and you don't have your worries, what is left? Adventure, I hope. And probably new stuff.

Well, I better get back to packing.

Anticipation

2009-02-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

Well, it's almost here. We leave February 4th on British Airways, landing in Accra. After a day to recover, we'll be going to Kumasi, then Cape Coast. After a month in Ghana, we leave for London on the 4th of March. It will be a busy month with lots to learn about and do. We've put ourselves in the hands of our friend Joseph whose message was to trust in the Lord saying, "All will be well." That is a deceptively difficult lesson to learn.

The title of the first 2 months of our trip is The Triangle of Hope. It is a play on the "Triangle of Despair," a term used to describe the trade routes between west Africa, the Americas, and England. Cargo ships carried humans sold into slavery, sugar, tobacco, cotton, and manufactured goods, trading between port cities such as Cape Coast, in west Africa, Richmond, Virginia, in the US and Liverpool, England. We will be traveling in a different century and in a different world along the same route seeking to learn and understand about those worlds - the old and the new. Along the way we hope to forge friendships both for ourselves, but also for the Diocese of Virginia and St. Peters.

The people of St. Peters gave us a wonderful send - off with food from each country we'll be visiting. A travel kit that should be the envy of the world and many wonderful gifts came from parishioners. Craig and I are deeply grateful for all the support and friendship at St. Peter's and we hope to represent you well and learn much to tell you when we return. Along the way, I'll use this blog to post news and pictures and ruminate a bit.