september morning...

:: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." – E. B. White

A few photo credits...

mug :: thanks to chuck, chris and jenny for all coming to my aid to replace my tragic loss with what is now a set of FOUR intact memories...

waffles :: thanks to glen, for leaving me the Alaska brand waffle maker in Germany that took 1.5 years to make it across the border... and to steph for the recipe from our cabin 41 fridge...

figs :: thanks to nikki for introducing me to them at the market and for introducing me to so many beautiful parts of life in lausanne...

flowers :: thanks to the front porch of my beautiful home for being a plentious source of free hydrangea...

view :: thanks to God for creating green fields and blue mountains and for surrounding me with them...

company :: thanks to my kindred spirit sarah, who crossed six time zones so I wouldn't miss this moment...

bella italia...

I finally crossed the border... Five days and four nights in Florence and Venice with my best friend Sarah from my college world... I won't waste words trying to describe either city except to say this...

Florence is a city rich with amazing art, but Venice is art... even in the rain.

:: "Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life."
- Anna Akhmatova

precisely...

I'm down to one Pilot pen. So important is this particular instrument to my daily Iife that I'm actually carrying it back and forth with me from my office to my home. (Granted, they are in the same building, but still...) I've ransacked my room but can't find a stray one anywhere -- not in my junk drawer, not in the couch cushions, not under the bed...

Thankfully I'm having some imported from the US in three days (yes, that's how SOON the long-awaited visit of my college best friend is!) so as long as the ink holds out (and she doesn't pack them in her carryon) I should be okay. If they exist in Switzerland, I can't find them. I did see some in a store in Oxford the other weekend but I just couldn't bring myself to pay £2 for one (that's $3.79!)... but that was when I still had two. This week I might have reconsidered.

If you don't understand pen addiction I probably can't really explain it to you. I haven't used anything else since my sophomore year of college (exception: sharpie markers are acceptable for certain tasks) -- that's a long time. I literally lose my ability to think without this pen. It's impossible to write in my journal with anything else.

Even for my three years onboard a ship on the coast of Africa I had them specially imported for my whole communications crew as a vital creative tool and morale-builder. One year I actually made an impassioned case to our COO for them to be included in our office budget. I lost, unfortunately, but became a beneficent donor of Pilot pens instead.

Life is in the details. And details become even more important when the big picture of your life is spinning out of control...

Pilot Precise Rolling Ball V5... black ink. And journals with lines...

:: "Stay Up Late: Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world." — Bruce Mau, designer

les fleurs...

indian summer...

:: "In summer, the song sings itself." – William Carlos William

beauty...

:: "Beauty... is the shadow of God on the universe."
– Gabriela Mistral, Desolacíon

night...

(bonus journal entry from my extra travel time last week...)

On a plane to London I read a disturbing book... "Night", by Elie Wiesel... holocaust survivor. I've read holocaust stories before, but this one seemed more real somehow. More horrible.

I don't know how the human spirit can survive such evil. I don't know how faith can survive that. I don't know if mine would.

I want to read the rest of his story... how he came back from that night. Real people. Real stories. They are the worst and the best of all...

That and an email from a friend yesterday are still ringing in my mind. He'd just returned from a trip overseas with his organization that rescues trafficked children, and was trying to come to grips with what he'd seen.

"God is there in the suffering..."

This is the thing – when there is such suffering and injustice in the world, how can I simply go on and live my life? There must be a way I can still make a difference. There must be a way I can do more, not less, with my future. There must be something God wants me to do.

Anything. I suppose it could really be anything.

Just not nothing.

:: The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. – Elie Wiesel

serendipity...

The other day I randomly found an interesting online discussion, all started by a newspaper editorial:

The endangered joy of serendipity: the modern world makes it harder to discover what you didn't know you were looking for."

The writer echoes thoughts from my "almost missed" post, on less being more.... and abundance being distracting. He also iterates my feelings about online matchmaking (or any other form). (read it if you're curious...)

I think most of the editorial comes from the writer missing the "good old days", and he does make some points; however, the fact that I even stumbled across this article online is proof that there are still plenty of opportunities for serendipitous discoveries on the world wide web -- doesn't it really depend more on the nature of the observer?

Discovery is an attitude, I think. Whether you take the road less traveled or the one you already know like the back of your hand, you can be just as surprised by the serendipitous.

I'm thinking a lot about this as I anticipate moving back to America. Somewhere in my head it makes sense that there would be more possibilities for discovery in a place where I am surrounded by the unknown -- that Europe would hold so many more possibilities than my good old USA. But that's not necessarily true. My discoveries are limited more by my own inhibitions and mindset than by my location or setting.

I'm not by nature very adventurous. This entire life beyond North American shores has been a surprise to me. In my six years abroad I've grasped a small taste for wanderlust, but I don't think it's in my blood like my friends who have wracked up 80-plus countries. But that's why this life has been so good for me.

Every week and nearly every day, I am forced to do something I've never done before. And it usually does take me forcing myself. I don't know where the resistance still comes from, when time and time again I've been happily rewarded with positive experiences. Maybe it's just part of my personality -- my psyche -- to want to stick to the known and the familiar. Maybe it comes from growing up in a small town and a sheltered environment. Who knows -- but I do know that I grew up dreaming -- encouraged to dream. And that big, idealistic imagination has been enough to launch me past my own fears and logic thousands of times.

One response to the serendipity discussion echoes my thoughts nearly exactly:

We must allow ourselves to be surprised. We must relearn how to be human, to start again as we did as children - learning through awkward and bungling discovery.

:: "Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy." – Anne Frank

sundays...

:: "This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me." – Colleen Wainwright

saturdays...

:: "The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life." – Robert Louis Stevenson

almost missed...

Believe it or not, I do write, even if it's not here.

Last weekend I finished a journal and this week started a new one... dubbed my "Italian summer" journal (1. because it's handmade from Italy and 2. because I'm lucky enough to be planning two trips to Italy this summer when I've never been before...)

An excerpt from my Italian sumer beginning...

"Last night I looked up from my desk at 8:15 pm and saw a golden rose sky, so amazing it looked like a painting. I went to the window as if drawn, just to look, and then I saw the most incredible rainbow -- brilliant, bright, on the other side of the sunset sky, arching across the green field and treeline, arching over my house. I ran outside and stood in the rain and the glow and just stared... at a moment I almost missed.

That's what life is... the moment we almost miss, every day. I want to find that. More importantly, I want to recognize it when I see it. Because so much of the time it's right there and I'm just not looking. Not just out the window -- I had to get up and move before I saw the most amazing part."

Rainbows are such an intriguing phenomenon. No two people see exactly same one. Rainbows are interactions of light and water seen only in the eye of the beholder, from a certain angle, viewable for sheer moments. So... if there is no one to see a rainbow, does it exist at all?

If I'd been the only person in the world to see that beautiful moment, God still would have made it. But if I hadn't been there to see it at all -- if I hadn't gotten up and moved from my chair, would it still have been there to be seen?

I wonder how many rainbows I've missed that were meant for me...

:: “Beauty is not caused. It is.” – Emily Dickinson

rocks with a view...

I'm trying to spend less time looking at a computer screen and more time looking at this...

...the view from my favorite picnic/reading spot... Chateau de Chillon, Lac Léman

:: Perhaps the waves are saying: Remember your dreams. Remember your dreams. Remember your dreams... – ashes and snow

a day late...

I just realized that when the time changed this week I somehow set my computer a whole day ahead instead of just an hour... Which meant that I thought I was posting on Wednesday, which would be appropriate anyway, because I feel like I'm a day late for everything this week...

A day late for my nephew's 11th birthday... A day late figuring out how to handle the latest communications curveball thrown at Mercy Ships... A day late editing text for the next fundraising appeal that needs to go to 9 different nations...

Thankfully, Alaska is so many time zones behind that I can still call my nephew and I think he'll forgive me.

The work stuff is a bit trickier... Staring at my screen with a looming deadline on this appeal, I wonder yet again how I ended up with this editorial task. I love wordcraft, but I'm a designer, not an editor. And I hate corporate fundraising letters – wouldn't that make me the last person who should be writing them?

But then... somewhere in the middle of reading about a Liberian girl named Irene who survived a disease called noma and has lived with a disfigured face for 20 years, I forget what day it is. I forget I don't have any real editorial credentials and that the clock is ticking towards 10:00 pm. I forget the conference calls I haven't had time to prepare for and the organizational hoops I haven't jumped through. Politics fade away to petty and so does my perfectionism.

All that really matters is that there are 400,000 children a year being attacked by a disease most of the world doesn't even know exists -- a monstrous infection that is entirely preventable and treatable. What matters is that 8 out of 10 of those children die in agony, their parents watching helplessly. And the 1 or 2 that live, survive horribly disfigured and suffer emotional pain for the rest of their lives... Unless...

Somebody does something.

This imperfect and sometimes dysfunctional organization that I work for is doing something. The flesh and blood people that make up this organization are doing something – at the cost of much more than their blood, sweat and tears, they are trying to make a difference. And they are.

People suffer and die in our world for lots of reasons. A senseless, preventable disease like noma should not ever be a reason.

What matters is that people need to know this – they need to realize this tragedy is happening in their global neighborhood, and they CAN do something about it. Somewhere in between the predictable lines of yet another fundraising letter, is it conceivably possible that the words I choose could help them get that?

Maybe it's not too late.

:: Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them... he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?" God said, "I did do something. I made you." – Author Unknown

two faces...

Last summer while working on the mercy show I was especially drawn to this image Scott took at the medical screening during the last Liberia outreach of a girl who suffered the results of a disease called noma...

Her face has stuck with me, and last week it somehow seemed right for her to go in the new Mercy Ships general brochure (which you'll see soon), but I wanted to know her name...

I emailed Scott on the Anastasis to see if he remembered her... and I found out she just happened to be onboard, in the ward. She'd come back a full year later to the next screening and made it to surgery.

This is her now... Mazay, 15 years old.

She wants to be a nurse.


:: more about noma
:: a documentary on noma
:: what mercy ships is doing

french...

...it's harder than I thought.

Reading and comprehending French is one thing... speaking it (properly) is quite another. My three-week course one year ago might have accomplished more if I hadn't immediately returned to America for three months afterwards. But what kind of language averages three letters per word that you don't pronounce? And what kind of country has not one, not two, but FOUR national languages??

I could make up a whole list of excuses for why I'm not conversational yet, but instead I'm trying to come up with reasons to convince myself why I need to be able to speak French at all...

Reasons to learn French:
1. So I can go to the post office by myself.
2. So I can read my letters from the government and the bank myself.
3. So I can say something besides "Bonjour, ça va?" to the cleaning lady and the postman.
4. So I can order at a restaurant without the waiter automatically switching to English.
5. So people won't be rude to me when I finally go to Paris.
6. So I can watch more than just 4 news channels.
7. So I can impress people when they come to visit me.
8. So when I leave I will have something to show for living in another country for two years.
9. So I can join the rest of the world outside America in which everybody knows (at least) a second language.
10. So I can prove to myself my own theory that there is nothing I can't learn.

You'd think I would love languages, because I so love words. But it might actually be that love of words and my profound relationship with them that makes it that much harder to learn a whole world of new ones.

The English language is like a dear friend I've grown up with -- familiar, intimate, like family. I've known it as long as I can remember, and I know it inside out. I know its nuances and idiosyncrasies and I know how to bring out its best. It's a relationship I treasure and even marvel at, on occasion.

And French -- French is that aloof stranger I'm intrigued by, but resist being forced to get to know. An imposter in familiar letters, taking on suspicious forms and sounds that I don't recognize. I begrudgingly admire the way French looks... even how it sounds... But it just hasn't endeared itself to me yet. I want to get to know it on my own terms, gradually, until it feels comfortable and fits naturally into my life. It seems so forced and manipulative to spend obsessive hours insisting on a relationship, abusing its pronunciation... My passive personality would much rather casually warm up to a language than stalk it.

At the same time, I realize that many of the best things in my life have come completely uninvited. Including people. Random strangers I never planned to or wanted to meet, thrown into my life with or without my consent. But then somehow, through the disarming subtlety of time and shared experience, we connected. And eventually I realized I couldn't remember life before them or imagine the future without them. They added pieces to my life that I never knew I needed.

So I'm making an effort with French. Extending the hand of friendship, and trying not to be too reluctant about it. It helps that I have the world's most interesting and excellent tutor -- Jean-Pierre.

Jean-Pierre is the definition of "debonaire" -- a perfect Suisse-Romande gentleman and an impressively well-read traveller who is on at least his 4th or 5th language. He fascinates me and frightens me at the same time -- a little like the French language. But he's also like my misplaced Swiss grandfather. What could possibly be intimidating about someone who makes me pumpkin soup and listens to classical music and stops our lessons to play with his dog?

Perhaps if for no other reason, I'll learn French for Jean-Pierre.

:: "It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning." – Claude Bernard, French Physiologist

distance...

I think maybe I will write a book someday about long-distance friendships. I wonder if by then I'll be an authority on keeping them or on losing them... Probably both.

I'm not sure if it just feels this way right now, or if it's deja vu of so many other seasons in my life that makes me think I've had more than my share of missing people. You could say it's been my choice, I suppose – moving around too much and never staying in the same place...

Ironically, it's that moving which has brought me most of my deepest relationships. And it's that same moving that constantly threatens to take them away...

dis·tance n.
1. The extent of space between two objects or places; an intervening space.
2. The fact or condition of being apart in space; remoteness.

How long can you stay connected when the things that connect you become fewer and fewer? Perhaps that's why I find myself more and more in conversations with old friends, reminiscing and talking about the past. It's easier than the present, because our histories connect us – our present is a constant reminder that our lives are being pulled farther apart.

Are friendships – or any relationship, for that matter – a product of circumstance? Do we choose our closest friends? Do they choose us? Or does someone or something else orchestrate our crossings?

I believe the latter statement. I believe that a divinely creative mind, which sees all and knows all through a continuum we cannot understand, designs our lives as we go along, ever working things for our ultimate good. Notice I say ultimate good... not necessarily immediate good, or present good, or continual good... Life is hard. It's we who made it that way. God is busy providing ways to restore it.

Finding bridges across the distance is one.

:: "Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great." – Rainer Maria Rilke

still life...

my desk... (sculpture by Shad, age 4)

pictures of my office from my boss' record label website...

quote for the day...

:: "Don't frown, because you never know when someone is falling in love with your smile."

1966...

Colombo Harbour, 1966... tugboat at work and the Italian liner Victoria...
:: photographed by Richard Francis – Ships

broken memories...

I dropped and broke my Sala Victoria mug yesterday.

If you just gasped in shock and horror, then you are one of the few people who knows just a little of how much that ceramic object meant to me.

It was just a mug. But one doesn't cry over just a mug. It meant so much more than that to me.

To begin with, I was its creator. I searched for hours on a slow internet connection through worldwide mug vendors to find just the right size (to comfortably fit a double-tall latte), just the right shape (graceful but unique), and just the right color (something that would go with a 50-year old classic ocean liner). I labored to come up with just the right words ("coffee on a mission" )... just the right typeface (upper or lowercase?)... and just the right placement of that logo (no to mention the hours spent on the logo itself). And before that, I spent weeks convincing the finance officer we would actually be able to sell them and make money... And that was all just for the mug...

Before the mug, there was the Sala Victoria Café. There's really only one other person (Genevieve, where are you?) who has any idea what went into birthing that little coffee shop on our ship. It was so much more than a café. At first, the Sala Victoria was just a dream in our heads and a donated espresso machine in the abandoned Mediterranean Lounge bar... Then it was a saga of politics and plumbers and perseverance... And finally, it was a name and a West African carved sign and a reality. The Sala Victoria became a meeting place for people who desperately needed to meet each other... a breathing space of conversation and laughter for people who desperately needed to relax... a venue for events big and small that became the stuff of Anastasis legend (who can forget Abba Karaoke, or the Pirate Auction, or the 50th Birthday party at sea?). The Sala Victoria became a very special place, for some very special people, within walls that had seen so much...

Long before the Sala Victoria, there was her namesake. The M/V Victoria was a Italian-built luxury cruise liner launched in 1953 – the past life of the beautiful vessel we renamed the Anastasis and called a hospital and home. The Victoria was an aristocratic debutant, reborn to be a gracious merciful angel, pointing her bow toward the world's forgotten places, brightening dull African ports with her beauty and softening harsh worlds with her hope... She was so much more than just a ship.

That mug was the only tangible thing I have from the ship, really. One of the only things I have to remember her by. And in six months, there will be no ship. She will sail off into some sunset to be sacrificed into scrap metal, and for months I have been trying to find words to express how I feel about that...

It was more than just a mug, you see. And glued together in eleven pieces, it will still be special to me.

Maybe even moreso.

:: "If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery