Waiting

We have been waiting on weather hold for a week now.  This is certainly not an unpleasant thing, as New Zealand is truly an enchanting country.  God did not hold back in making it beautiful, and the numinous is easy to find "tramping" (Kiwi for hiking) the remoter back-country.  The briefing requirements have been light, and it has allowed ample opportunity to either sit in the hotel, or in nearby restaurants and bars.  Or, the opportunity to cast aside those things and seek quieter, wilder places...

Because we have been delayed so long, yesterday was used to give us most of the Arctic Field Safety training.  Everything that does not require actual snow and ice we got oriented on, including emergency stoves, tents, go-bags, etc. The equipment orientation is harder down there, as one has to contend with both wind and cold fingers, so I felt a little cheated of the experience.  I will have to rectify that once I get down there.

In that harsh kingdom the dry Wind is herald to the Cold who gives no mercy.  They consume life giving moisture and heat, and the battle against them is the battle against rapid dehydration and hypothermia.  Succumb to those wounds, and you are given into the hands of the dark mistress sleep... the instructor suggested 90-100 ounces of water daily and 50%-100% more calories than we might consume in more temperate climes.

Hmmm... can't forget to eat down there.  Good thing the survival bars are 1000 calories per palm-sized portion. 

With that to think about, we ended the day meeting the huskies kept at the Antarctic Cenre for the public.  None of them were actually pure bred huskies, and the dog handler, a Maori carpenter who had worked down there decades ago before they quit using working dogs, told us that these dogs were rescues cross bred as pets.  The working dogs he had known years back were much larger, much tougher, and much fiercer.  He had a sign posted with the cautions regarding canine aggressive body language... but they had not seemed to get the memo.



In the mean time, there is the waiting...


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I have been checking over my Kindle to make sure that everything is properly downloaded in full, and I have been skimming odd and end things today.  Here is a passage by Seneca that reminds me of Solomon's writings:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…

Life is long if you know how to use it.
 
He discusses this in more breadth, warning about wasting time either worrying about the past or worrying about the future; about the waste of being ever beholden to everyone else without looking after your own matters; about the deceptive waste in busyness.  Is there a thorn in that for each one of us I wonder, or just me?

As I speak to some of the other Ice People about the delays I have found many are kind of glum and ill at ease as they sit on their phones or computers with a drink at hand in the common areas of the hotel.  They talk about how they are ready to go, and I think, why so am I... and yet I am relishing the hours that we aren't training to go out into this country. 

It is a balm I think for all the unpleasant things of the last three years that have included worry about past, worry about future, and waiting, stretched tight as a cord, sweating and praying night after night only to be followed by ruin.  It renews Job as a favorite, even as it makes it clear how much there is to be thankful for anyway.  There is a peculiar irony that I find the calm, and the peace, and the vivifying brush with the numinous out here in the wild, threwdish places.

We are created to be in community, and in communion, horizontally as well as vertically.  It is a conundrum then, that those places, those communities that we should most expect to find easy communion are too often the ones that push back the most.  I have argued in the past that making a Rivendell of bookish, artistic, and adventurous Christians would be the ideal community in this life... but it does not seem to be so.  Among the most basic intuitions of human experience, is the desire for connection because all we think, all we say, all we make or do looses meaning or relevance if there is no one else to receive it.  And below the surface of that reality, is the truth that we are made by God to love and be loved.  It seems rather, that through the vicissitudes of life we find the starkness most revealed, and in the starkness, the possibility of the stillness where the Still, Small Voice can actually be heard.  Were we elves, perhaps Rivendell would work... but for humans, I suspect that is a path to comfortable complacence.  Elijah did not hear that Voice in Jeruselem, but in the wilderness.

Out in the beauty of the mountains, I found a peculiar cairn.  I don't know what the animal was, or why it had been laid so carefully to rest on the rocks.  It had taken some effort for whoever had raised the stones.  Who were they reaching out to?  What message was this?


We reach out for contact, even in the remotest of places, seeking to find and make meaning of the world around us, of ourselves in it world, and of ourselves with others. 

In the lonely places, we reach out to let others know that they are not alone even as we invite connection.  Sometimes, we find more than we had imagined.

I was asked before I left, to send word and pictures on Facebook or Instagram.  To raise a digital cairn as it were.  I'll go out on a limb and say, that if I can never put a dime in Zuckerberg's shady pocket, I will have done a good thing in life.  But with mixed feelings, I raise a digital cairn.  Partly to honor the request by those who have asked... partly for myself, in an effort to discipline myself to get back into a writing habit after having set it aside for, reasons... partly to play, and partly to clear my thinking, and to feed my imagination.  Writing about rivers opal green, and of Maori myth about the Taniwha of Rakaia Gorge who makes "the wind that devours people", or of The Wizard in Cathedral square. 

It's funny, because on the one hand it seems a that blogging is at least a little vanity (in multiple meanings of that word) that I am inclined to mock.  On the other hand, there is a bit of fear and humility... for if it is an effort at creativity, then it is an endeavor fraught with risk.  For to create authentically is to be vulnerable.  In the book Art and Fear, there is the discussion on that question, that doubt that says what if I'm a fraud?  The critic is the sour fellow that looks to tear down each stone of the cairn as it is built, until there is no cairn... and no connection.  Old fashioned letters sent, and received months after the date at the top seem most honest, as once they are sent, they are not subject to the temptation of constant revision, and editing, and expunging that the ephemeral-permenance to which digital media is.  The perfectionist whispers that it is not good enough yet... wait and don't make. It is a trap.  Adam Savage says in his book that, one of the most critical things for a successful maker (in whatever creative field), is to take the risk to share, and give away what you have. 

I build this ragged, imperfect heap of words and pictures.  It is an ersatz cairn.

And in the mean time, there is the waiting...